Atlanta Burns Again
by Aldenata
Summary: Part 1 of 4. War Diary of a Georgia Militia member, interspersed with vignettes of others fighting for survival in Atlanta, the North Georgia aream and the rest of the world. Somewhat more realistic take on what the world would look like in the face of a societal collapse. Takes place before Season 1. Revised as of 7 June, 2014
1. Chapter 1: The Rebel Yell

_"Then arose that do-or-die expression, that maniacal maelstrom of sound; that penetrating, rasping, shrieking, blood-curdling noise that could be heard for miles and whose volume reached the heavens–such an expression as never yet came from the throats of sane men, but from men whom the seething blast of an imaginary hell would not check while the sound lasted."_  
>-Colonel Keller Anderson of Kentucky's Orphan Brigade<p>

* * *

><p><strong><strong><strong>17<strong> June, 2011**  
>2 miles north of Doraville, Georgia, USA<br>**

The skitter plodded southward on Buford Highway, in procession with some half-dozen of his own kind, three of their robotic servants, and thirty-six of their newest human augments. Their destination was the Doraville MARTA station, a central hub for new acquisitions in the area. The return trips were always fraught with peril, and he diligently scanned the tree lines as he marched, looking for signs of hidden explosives or the glint of a kinetic weapon's barrel.

"AYE-YE AYE-YE ARRROOO! AYE-YE AYE-YE ARRROOO!"

They were accosted at once by several shrieks from the surrounding area—each and every one of the creatures stopped and listened for the sources of the noise. The robots began searching their databases to offer suggestions as to what local life-form could create such a sound. They knew the sounds of hounds baying, rabbits screaming and coyotes howling; this had similarities, but ultimately could not have been any of those. The leader of the party worriedly conversed with his fellows; they quickly agreed to set the augments on standby whilst fireteams were deployed to investigate the disturbance.

Major James Langdon of the Atmarga Column's Cavalry Regiment lay amidst the tangle of trees and kudzu surrounding the road. His elite troop had positioned itself on both sides of the highway, armed mostly with high-caliber, semi-automatic rifles. A fourth of them held back in a nearby commercial park, guarding the horses and serving as a potential emergency reserve.[1] They had two World War II vintage antitank rifles (a Japanese Type 97 and a Finnish Lahti L-39) positioned in the trees at a bend in the highway, along with a M2 Browning and M240 machine-gun. As the aliens began to move away from their captives, the human ambushcade set the waning day alight with gunfire.

"Bipeds!" thought the leader as he ordered his soldiers to fan out. Sensors detected fire from two… no, three… directions. No sooner had the projectiles started hitting did he know he was in trouble; these shells were much bigger than average, big enough to kill even when they didn't impact the facial region. He drew closer to the augments, knowing the enemy (probably) would not use their rapid-fire weapons on their own kind.

Robots fired explosives into what they suspected to be the enemies' hiding places, even as 20 millimeter shells slammed into their frames.[2] The first one died with a single lucky round to a vital component. The second one was succumbed by a literal cratering from the semiautomatic cannons. The third one had his weapon blasted off and his legs shot out from under him. The humans would have probably enjoyed strapping him alive between two mules and taking him home for study, had he not used the last of his power to initiate a system wipe, becoming so much scrap within seconds.

Langdon yipped and yelled in harmony with the others as he emptied his Remington Model 8 and slammed in another custom-built extended magazine. Fifteen more rounds of .35 caliber hardened steel flew downrange, slamming into legs and faces and torsos. "Check your targets! Conserve your ammunition!" he ordered himself; the battle should always be started with an overwhelming volume of fire to confuse their sensors, but accuracy quickly takes precedence if you survive long enough for follow-up shots.

The leader sent out a final request for air support as he writhed in agony on the pavement. He knew he was dead. His sensors indicated no penetration wounds, but thirty thousand combined footpound forces of kinetic energy will liquefy one's organs no matter what kind of armour protects them. All the others either lay dead or restlessly awaited death as he did. The augments stood by in placid indifference. Rapt in pain and delirium as he watched the bipeds and their quadrupedal beasts emerge from the tree line, he was thankful his suffering would end soon.

Major Langdon rived the creature's face with one firm thrust of his sabre. Not something he liked doing, but necessary and perhaps humane. Less than a minute is how long it had taken to destroy this group, but that wasn't half as long as it would take for aircraft to destroy his command should their egress be delayed.

Of the ninety-six men in his troop, four were dead and three wounded. Five of the children had been killed, none wounded. The rest were collected by the cavaliers and thrown across their saddles— most would become the responsibility of rehabilitative organizations in Alpharetta or further north, many would find their way into local militias, a few might ride with him one day. All in all, he considered the raid a satisfactory, if small, victory.

The troop dispersed into squad and platoon sized forces to better avoid detection. A night wind swept through the subdivision and the full moon, hanging in between the earth and a thick cover of clouds, illuminated the path home for them. Their Battle Flags fluttered wildly in the wind, and moonbeams showed the features in a brilliant luminescent monochrome.

"Always fun to visit the big city." stated one of the Colonel's aides, a twelve year old distant cousin and former Cowboy Mounted Shooter, still beaming from the new notch on her M1 Carbine.

"That it is, honey, that it is."

"Didn't find none of our missing kin, though."

"Nope." replied Langdon. He had been a very curt man even before the war, and none of the events since then had inured him to conversation.

"Tomorrow, I'll think of some way to get them back." quoted the young girl. "After all, tomorrow is another day."

* * *

><p>1. A traditional disadvantage of dismounted cavalry is that some of the riders, usually a fourth, must stay behind to hold the horses for the others, though three men shooting from the ground will still be more effective than four on horseback. During the American Civil War, certain commanders came up with the idea of using their holders as a fresh reserve, trading them out near the end of battle to either pursue a retreating enemy or to cover their own force's retreat. Nathan Bedford Forrest most famously made use of this manuver at the Battle of Brice Crossroads. Russian cossacks studied these tactics and continued to use them in both World Wars, and they might be seen again in a fuel-starved, post-apocalyptic scenario.<p>

2. Mechs don't seem particularly hardy; we've seen cases of them being destroyed with grenade bundles and C4 charges—if those are effective then so too should be large-calibre amour-peircing bullets. Weapons such as those mentioned are defined as destructive devises under US Federal law, but they're still surprisingly common among civilian military weapons enthusiasts and extreme long-range shooters.


	2. Chapter 2: Burial Detail

_"O what are all my sufferings here  
>If Lord, thou count me meet<br>With that enraptured host t'appear,  
>And worship at thy feet!<br>Give joy or grief, give ease or pain,  
>Take life or friends away:<br>But let me find them all again  
>In that eternal day."<em>  
>-Charles Wesley, Funeral Hymns, second series, 1759<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Monday evening, February 14th, 2011*<strong>

As we sang And Let This Feeble Body Fail and How Firm A Foundation, I couldn't help but notice what a beautiful bass-baritone singer we have in our platoon lieutenant[1], Christopher Hallock. He would do well if he takes his voice to Nashville one day, assuming he's not too bashful for stage performance. And assuming there still is a Nashville.

Is it wrong for me to write in the middle of a funeral? Seems that church is the only time I can ever find to do so. I know I'm supposed to be listening to the preaching, but I can do both at the same time, can't I? I remember going when I was younger and how many of the older ladies would have copies of Reader's Digest hidden behind their Bibles, so maybe I'm not erring too badly.

Our company chaplain[2] is reading from Psalm 90 and Romans 5. Her sermon is a short one, focusing on the shortness of life, the inevitability of death, the hope of eternal life through Christ and the eventual triumph of grace over death. She closes in prayer, and we all bid a final goodbye to three more comrades.

I was only transferred to this company a few days ago and I didn't really get a chance to meet any of them. I've been told that my probationary period will be ending ahead of schedule so I can help take their places. Hurray for me I guess. Sergeant "Skitter", my squad leader and personal trainer, says I have to bring a spider's[3] head home on a stick before I'm truly accepted.

Skitters… apparently down here that's a synonym for "scampers". Well, back in Smyrna, Maine, it was a synonym for "the runs". He's also a good singer, but his sound and mannerism has more in common with Hank Williams III than ole Tennessee Ernie Ford back there. Services are wrapping up right now so I'll have to do more writing later.

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Tuesday morning, February 15th, 2011*<strong>

Ok, I'll try and use my meal time as an opportunity to write. I know I tried that when this whole thing started, but for the first month after the sky fell I didn't have very many regular meals.

My probation was rescinded last night. I am now Private Sarah Tagliabue of B Squad, 3rd Platoon, 1172/18th "G" Company, 12th Regiment, Fifth Brigade, Georgia Militia. The old M-14 rifle I've been using has been assigned as my personal weapon, and I've managed to find enough supplies to remain self-sufficient for the minimum expected time of twenty-four hours. I hope I can go on a few more scavenging runs and find some more supplies before the spiders attack or they send my squad into any serious combat.

I should probably make a note here as to how our resistance group is organized. The Georgia Militia is a holdover from the right-wing militia movements of the 1990's. It was originally divided into four brigades for each quadrant of the state, each with separate battalions and a single company assigned to the defense of each state militia district… in theory. In practice, about seventeen companies were active and total membership was reckoned at about a thousand, with about a thousand more members in other such organizations throughout the state.

Right now, we have five brigades (fifth brigade focuses on Atlanta and naturally represents the bulk of our forces), 25 regiments, 240 active companies and over 30,000 active personnel. We're growing daily, but not at the rate we had been when the war started.

As far as I know, Metro Atlanta is the only part of Georgia with a significant alien ground presence, though they've bombed other cities and there was a good deal of collateral damage when they slagged the state's many military bases. It seems as though they're building their tower right on top of the CNN Building, and have taken full control of most of downtown within five miles of it.

They like to follow major Interstates. In the east, they're steadily pushing through Druid Hills and into Decatur, they're moving down I-20 towards Gresham Park and Panthersville, but I think they're ignoring the Belvedere Park and Candler-McAfee communities for now. In the northeast, there's a constant back and forth between us and them in the endless wastelands of Suburban Atlanta. In the north, they took Peachtree Hills and Lindberg and are hotly contesting Buckhead, with Wesley Road marking their furthest advances there. In the south is where they've advanced the quickest. East Point has fallen, College Park is under attack... they seem to be making a grab for Hartsfield airport. In the west, they've been stalled on I-20, again near the Wesley Road junction.

(Keep in mind that, given our communications difficulties, a lot of this information may be false or dated.)

And that brings us to the 12th Regiment. It's been tasked with holding the Norfolk-Southern rail yard and the industrial areas between I-75 and Georgia Highway 8. G Company is on the tip of the spear, with the task of fortifying and holding Grove Park Elementary School. The enemy wants this area bad, and has sent lots of spiders, robots and bombers to take it. Our job is to kill them all… we'll see how well that goes.

* * *

><p>1. I may have overlooked it, but as far as I could tell there was almost no formal ranking or internal structure within the 2nd Massachusetts Militia Regiment—which itself is frankly more of a large company or small battalion than a regiment: there was Captain Weaver, second-in-command Mason, and... a bunch of unranked, nondescript fighters and civilians (more on that dichotomy later).<p>

I can think of several reasons why this could be. Maybe the 2nd Mass suffered such heavy attrition in the six months of fighting before the TV Series that maintaining a hierarchical organization was impossible. Maybe it's deliberate; non-hierarchial units did exist on the anarchist sides during the Russian, German and Spanish Civil Wars—though they seldom won against more traditional forces. Maybe the writers don't know how armies work.

2. Given the dispersed nature of human resistance, many things that might have once been the functions of battalion-sized forces or larger will naturally devolve to the company level, especially in areas with active fighting.

3. Spiders=skitters. I'm going by the Walking Dead routine of everyone using a different term for their enemy. May drop this if it starts confusing you or annoying me.


	3. Chapter 3: Big Beats, Hit Streets

_"In the Peninsula War the English nearly always used the sword for cutting. The French dragoons, on the contrary, used only the point which, with their long straight swords caused almost always a fatal wound. This made the English protest that the French did not fight fair. Marshal Saxe wished to arm the French cavalry with a blade of a triangular cross section so as to make the use of the point obligatory. At Wagram, when the cavalry of the guard passed in review before a charge, Napoleon called to them, 'Don't cut! The point! The point!'"_  
>-George S. Patton, The Form and Use of the Saber, 1913<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*Interlude*<br>**15** February, 2011  
>Along I-20, East Atlanta, Georgia, USA<strong>

Robert Williams Clifton's ancient M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle pounded his shoulder like a jackhammer as he blasted away at the horrors moving up the hill towards him. Around him were the other members of his gang, likewise firing into the gaping maws of Hell with whatever weapons were available. Some had nothing but crowbars and sharpened rebar, some used these in preference their "pieces", either due to lack of ammunition or a belief that melee weapons would better penetrate the alien carapaces.

Clifton would never let the the rest of his Posse[1] know it under normal circumstances, but he was something of a self-taught zoologist, and the internal resemblance of the alien warriors to terrestrial vertebrates was uncanny to say the least. This crustacean familiarity only served to make them all the more creepy; however, it did work well for him. It had been he who suggested that large-bore weapons (shotgun slugs, in particular) would be more effective against them. It had also been he who noted that, if you had to get into a close-range fight with one, you would be better off trying to stab or bludgeon it rather than slash or hack it. "Crack 'em like open like crab legs", had been the advice he gave his comrades.

The veil of night was lifted from the forest's ground level by lit molotovs and the spreading fire of the loam and underbrush; the pungent smell of charred pork and shellfish filled the air.

They were fighting for a thickly wooded valley and its ledges, nestled between two residential subdivisions. In the shallow creek lay many dead or dying warriors, and a number of drones, but more were coming and at surprisingly rapid speeds. On the opposing ridge, drones fired endless fusillades of energy and explosive shells, seemingly trying to keep the humans pinned so the warriors could overrun them. He didn't envy anyone who went mano a mano with warriors, but he was still glad he had affixed that homemade bayonet to his gun.[2]

Behind him, a man pulled up on a motorcycle and began blowing the call to fall back on a bugle. As planned, he and the squad's other machine-gunner stayed to cover the rest of the unit. When the gunner's head came flying off, he and some other fighters ran over to help the loader carry out the M249 and its ammunition.

Minutes passed. It wasn't quite a rout, but it wasn't a seamless tactical redeployment either. The aliens guessed (correctly) that the humans would leave landmines in their wake, and felt it better to move ahead cautiously rather than maintain contact. This bought Clifton and the others some much-needed time.

"What's up?" he yelled, to the first person he saw who might know.

"We're falling back to the defenses at Mark Trail Park." answered she, an older white woman in a threadbare police uniform; a platoon leader in the gang, if the gang had been organized enough to have platoons. He knew her face but not her name.

Clifton nodded, and motioned for his machinegun crew and recently-drafted ammo bearers to keep moving. He and a few others gathered around her, speaking as they walked.

"They got Terry Mill Elementary. Strikers bombed it. Davis' and Loya's boys are gone, all of them."

Clifton's heart sank. They may have been Mexicans, but they died protecting his people too. Murmurs and prayers came out from the rest of his squad as they followed behind.

"Pushed their way down Flat Shoals Road, too. Warriors and drones are making their way down 2nd Avenue to try and encircle us. A few branched off and are making their way down McAfee street."

Now tears started welling in his eyes as he thought about his girl and her girl. Three years ago, family could have been no further from his mind, but since the first day the motherships appeared, nothing in the world mattered but their safety. Seeing the look on his and other faces, the gangleader cop raised a hand to calm them.

"I know many of you have family living at the shopping centre, but don't worry about them. It's a mile and a half to get there and the 8th Regiment already sent the cavalry to cut off the advance. They'll make short work of that incursion." She chose not to mention to her fellow Atlantans that the 8th Regiment had literally sent a couple hundred men on horses to try and kill aliens; it was hard enough for her to believe.

"Worry about yourselves. We're setting up a new line on the far side of Mark Trail Park, and it's probably going to fall too—after that, hit and run. We're only staying there long enough to set up more booby traps; we can't do sustained firefights or else we risk another Striker bombing run. Now let's keep moving!"

A crack pierced the air and the man on point keeled over. The rest of the platoon dropped more deliberately as the lights of a drone shone over them. Bullets went flying from both sides, a second human went down. One of the men mounted a grenade on the barrel of his Lee-Enfield and fired it at the machine, blowing it apart.

Clifton felt a powerful weight on one shoulder and was instantly thrown to the ground. A warrior grabbed at him and tore a hunk of his scalp away. As it went for the kill, he skewered it upon his bayonet and then dove repeatedly into the creature's body. Others came down on the unit and they likewise tried to shake them off by any means possible. For those who survived, a valuable lesson would be learned about keeping an eye on the canopy.

All around, the Battle for Atlanta raged on.

* * *

><p>1. Mao Tse-tung mentioned bandits and criminal gangs as potential sources of manpower for a guerrilla war, and recent history shows that such groups are often among the first to take up arms in defense of their homes. He did note that their looser organizational nature would be a problem in combat, though he was more worried about politicalideological shortcomings than administrative or strategic.

2 Bayonet... on a light machine gun? Early prototypes of the BAR actually did have bayonets, but these were never issued in combat. Against an enemy who fights solely in melee combat, it ain't hard to imagine resistance members wanting something nice and sharp to keep them at arms length. Japanese Type 96-99 did come with bayonets, as does the modern Ultimax 100.

In late 1943, the 1st Marine Division received new flamethrowers for the New Britain campaign. The weapon was demonstrated to the legendary Lieutenant Colonel Lewis "Chesty" Puller, who asked "Where do you put the bayonet on the d****d thing?"


	4. Chapter 4: Command and Control

_"Fighting with a large army under your command is nowise different from fighting with a small one: it is merely a question of instituting signs and signals."_  
>-Sun Tzu<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Wednesday evening, February 16th, 2011*<strong>

Went on a scavenging run this morning, found nothing worth mentioning.

We're still working to make this area battle ready. The barricades reassure me, and I feel like they'll hold up well when the spiders come.

And, I got a job offering! Before I say what it is, perhaps I need to further explain just how the Georgia Militia is organized:

I mentioned our communications difficulties earlier. The truth of it is, for the moment, the only way our Brigade HQ can communicate with Regiment is if someone writes a letter and sends a courier out to see Colonel Berry directly. There is absolutely no wireless communication besides vacuum tube radios, and even those usually don't work beyond shouting distance. (Our resident techies think it's because of the nukes messing up the ionosphere, but I understand none of that.) Landlines are cooked in the ground, as if they had all been struck by lightning. I'm pretty sure EMPs aren't supposed to do that, yet the ones we were hit with did.[1]

We're trying to set up field telephones, or even field telegraphs; some regiments have even gone back to messenger pigeons and heliographs. It all seems so medieval, but I'm told that the British used both as late as the 1950's.

…point of all that being: this, and the inherently decentralized nature of guerrilla warfare, means that a captain gets much of the authority (and responsibly) normally dedicated to a colonel, and a colonel has the authority of a major general. And if a colonel is going to have the responsibility of a general, he sees it fitting that he have a general staff.

Apparently my captain told him of a former molecular engineering student from the backwoods of Maine who had recently joined his ranks. She had learned to live off the grid thanks to her parents; that rare breed of 1970's back-to-the-landers who actually stuck it out and were still living on their own production or what they traded with their neighbors. That piqued his interests, and he wants to arrange a meeting with me in a few days. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I mean, I'm glad my commander thinks that highly of me, but I'm comfortable in this company and don't think I'd want to leave. I'll have to speak to the colonel and see what exactly he wants me to do.

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Thursday morning, February 17th, 2011*<strong>

Stood guard all night.

Georgia can get very cold.[2]

Atlanta no longer being a heat island makes it worse.

When I first came down here, I thought the fact that it only snows three times a year meant that it was going to be Miami but with slightly worse food and slightly fewer drunken idiots running around the colleges. Instead, rather than a nice soft blanket of snow like we probably have in Aroostook County right now, what they get in the winter is rain.

Lots of cold, freezing rain.

Sure, it rains a lot in Maine too, but at least if I was back up there I could have some maple syrup after pulling guard.

Addendum: took a short nap, went to get a bite to eat, turns out we do have maple syrup! Sergeant Skitters managed to find some while scavenging. Granted, it contains high fructose corn syrup, but it doesn't have sorghum in it so I'm happy right now.[3]

* * *

><p>1. Think of the Falling Skies EMP as an even nastier version of the War of the Worlds EMP; it combines the worst parts of an E-bomb and a lightning storm, plus some stuff that should probably be impossible. Faraday cages and other forms of hardening are generally ineffective, germanium and gallium arsenide transistors are almost as vulnerable as silicon, vacuum tubes are somewhat vulnerable.<p>

2. I don't know if I've ever met a New Englander who didn't underdress on the first visit down here in winter. The fact that our most bitter storms tend to come late doesn't help.

This is only going to get worse in the coming years; one of the paradoxes of global warming is that an increasingly erratic atmosphere will occasionally swirl an out-of-season blast of arctic air into the temperate zones when they're least expected, often killing young crops. Forget chilly nights; that's a good way to cause a famine.

3. Syrup produced from sweet sorghum was once rather popular in America—more popular than maple syrup in the American South. Unfortunately, production of sorghum syrup is labour intensive and doesn't lend itself to mechanized agricultural techniques. Sorghum cultivation in the United States is at a fraction of what it once was (though it remains an essential staple in poor, arid countries throughout the world) and is more often used in the feeding of livestock than of people. Given the hardiness of the grain and its high nutritional value, it could easily see a renaissance during hard times.


	5. Chapter 5: Roadwork

_"Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains: Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house: Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes. And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days! But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day: For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be."_  
>-Jesus Christ (Matthew 24:16-21)<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*interlude*<br>******17** February, 2011****  
>Highway 19Expressway 400, south of Dahlonega, Georgia  
><strong>

Georgia can get very cold, thought Jeffery Eliot, as he contemplated an ashen sky that threatened further snow. From atop an overturned Kia, he surveyed the highway and the two bridges that carried it over the Chestatee River. Tightly barricaded, with the road beyond them choked by the abandoned vehicles of countless refugees, the bridges reminded him of countless others he had dealt with, half a century and half a world away.

Things had been bad in the winter of 1950, but fighting off wave after wave of crazed ChiComs had been placid work compared to the horrors of fighting fellow Americans. When the motherships first came down, many of the more vigilant city dwellers saw stormclouds gathering and fled for higher ground. When the nukes first came down, and it became apparent what the aliens wanted from survivors, everyone from Atlanta to Miami made a run for the foothills.

The outlying counties barely had enough food or supplies to see their own residents through till spring; many sheriff's offices had no choice but to set up roadblocks and tell anyone who didn't posses needed skills or have proof of family or friends in the area to keep moving or turn back. The refugees, especially those of the baser sort, did not respond well to this: armed mobs burned much of Gainesville and Cartersville; Cumming, Dawsonville, and Canton were sacked; Jasper and Dahlonega fought them off with heavy losses. Attackers and defenders both engaged repeatedly in actions that would have once been called war crimes. Often, gangs from the city would sneak around the roving patrols and hit isolated farmsteads or upper-class bedroom communities, bringing what the autodidact Eliot would call Magdeburgisieren[1] to much of the Atlanta exurbs. Those responsible, and those thought to be responsible, could look forward to Magdeburg Justice[2] whenever they were caught.

Mules brayed in protest as their handlers urged them forward, pulling Eliot out of his reminiscence. The chains went taught, the abandoned car likewise protested briefly, but in a second they both ambled up the road to less obstructive locales. With one more car clear, he instructed another team to move in and pull away another one.[5]

On the side of the road set a battered, full-sized pickup truck with four flat tires, to the frame of the pickup truck was affixed a single logging chain, on the other end of the logging chain was a crossbar, tied to the crossbar were the traces of the harnesses, to the harnesses were strapped a trio of stout Percheron horses. At the flap of the reigns, 5,400 pounds of horse pulled on a similar weight in metal; the movement for the beasts seemed almost effortless.

Eliot had four mules and five horses working in the clearing of vehicles, not including saddle mounts and wagon teams. Wreckers would probably go quicker, but any gas left in Lumpkin County was being saved for the tractors and the trading convoys that were making their way to survivors in the city.[3] Atlanta needed food, bullets, and medicine; Dahlonega needed fuel, fertalizer, and spare parts; both needed a reopened road. That last part was his job.

"Uncle Jeff!" yelled Jeffery Eliot's second in command, a fifteen year old nephew[4] and one of the oldest boys on the team—those older than him were mostly fighting in Atlanta or serving with the local militias.

"Yes, Jed."

"We found some more bodies on the northbound bridge. Our salvage teams won't go anywhere near them."

"Well, shucks."

Not the biggest of delays; that bridge had been heavily damaged in earlier fighting and wasn't yet safe for heavy traffic anyway.

"I'll let the coroner's office know when we get back to town. Anything else?"

"Um, how are we going to move that one?" he asked, pointing towards an 18-wheeler that was hogging both the lanes..

"Same way we're moving all the others." said Uncle Jeff with a shrug.

"The animals can move that?"

"Well, surely you remember watching Twenty Mule Team[5] with me. They can move pretty much anything if you use enough of them."

* * *

><p>1. A reference to the 1631 siege and sack of the German city of Magdeburg during the Thirty Years' War. After the year-long siege, only 5,000 of the original 30,000 citizens were still alive. By the end of the war in 1648, only 350 people still lived in the city.<p>

2. Or Magdeburg Mercy, a response often given thereafter by Protestant soldiers to Catholics who attempted to surrender.

[insert reference to Eric Flint's 1632 series here]

3. Outside of the Amish country, there's probably not enough farm animals to fully replace tractors for agriculture and other heavy work. However, there are far more mules and horses still being used in rural America than most people think, and they could see valued service in such a situation as this. Plenty has been said in the survivalist and peak oil awareness communities about the methods and difficulties of transitioning from industrialized intensive monoculture to an agricultural paradigm with a significant reduction in energy input, so I will not dwell upon this issue here.

4. One aspect of the TV series that I really liked was showing children in roles that would get their parents arrested today. During an existential crises, such things as child labour laws and compulsory education would have to be seriously reconsidered. There are people—such as the aforementioned Amish— who would argue that we should do this anyways.

5. A 1940 Western focusing on the massive wagons that carried borax from the mines of Southwest California to railheads in Southern Nevada during the 1870's. These wagons actually used eighteen mules and two horses, but clearly that didn't make for a cinematic title. Each one weighed over 36 short tons; comparable to modern tractor-trailers.


	6. Chapter 6: Marching on our Stomachs

_"Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato."_  
>-Wendell Berry<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Friday morning, February 18th, 2011*<strong>  
>There were some probing attacks to the south of us last night. D Company had to engage in some running skirmishes but handled themselves well. The rest of their battalion is still hanging in there.<p>

A quick word about battalions: for the Georgia Militia, they tend to be ad hoc and provisional conglomerations of multiple companies in a regiment, not unlike the battalions of the American Civil War or the Regimental Combat Teams of the pre-invasion Marines. A few regiments do have permanent battalions, but most of us don't have enough trained officers for it to be practical.

Columns and battlegroups exist in a similar manner, but those terms tend to denote smaller forces. Columns tend to represent irregular infantry and cavalry forces of company size or somewhat larger, like those of the early twentieth century guerrilla wars. Battlegroups denote highly mobile combined arms forces, like the Wehrmacht Kampfgruppen (not sure if I spelled that right) from which the name is derived.

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Sunday morning, February 20th, 2011*<strong>

So much to write, so little time.

I've just gotten back from Regimental HQ in Smyrna, Georgia, named for the ancient city in Turkey that my mom always talked about visiting. My hometown is also called Smyrna, though I think the name is the only things any of these three places have in common.

I spoke at length with Colonel Berry yesterday. No relation, as far as he knows, to environmentalist, localist, and pacifist Wendell Berry. Apparently he used to command the 79th Air Wing at Robbins Air Force Base, and was lucky enough to be off-base when the spiders launched their nukes.

The first thing I noticed when I entered his office was a Mac Powerbook on his desk, quite useless but still kept around like some kind of memento. I guess we all want to hold on to something of our former life. His desk was also several inches deep in hand-written correspondence to and from other commanders in the area, and I had to wonder how he found time to speak to a lowly private. I've heard all kinds of rumors about how crazy and incompetent he's supposed to be, but the man I spoke to seemed only slightly more eccentric than your average surviving human, and far more foresighted.

We spoke at length about food: basically, we need it, charity or trade with the outside world won't cover our needs, and scavenging won't either. To make up the difference, we'll have to produce our own. I noted that few if any insurgent forces in history have ever been able to split the difference between farming and fighting while being successful at both. Most had to rely on the spoils of war, the good will of the people, supply by friendly powers, or "taxation" levied against the locals… or a certain, scapegoated portion thereof (White Russians looting the property of Jews and Red Russians "redistributing" the property of Ukrainians, for example).

Colonel Berry agreed, though he noted the Mexican Zapatistas as an insurgent force who come close. He reiterated that he was not asking for full food self-sufficiency, he merely wanted me to keep my mind and eyes open as to strategies that could minimize the levels of hardship during the Starving Times sure to come between the last Ingles being looted and the first squash crop being picked.

He asked if there was any Amish communities near where I lived. I told him that there were indeed a handful of Amish in the other Smyrna, and that my family had been good friends with several of them. He asked if I knew anything about pre-industrial agriculture. I shrugged and said not really; my family mostly invested in orchards, small livestock, and beekeeping—our garden had always been a relatively small one and more my mom's doing than mine or my dad's… though I did learn a little about crops and draft animals from working on local farms. He thought about this at length before speaking: "Well, there's always books I guess." That got me to thinking about future scavenging trips.

Then he made his job proposal: I'll be an agricultural consultant. His office will contact me as needed, regular correspondence with the general staff will be arranged on the first and third weeks of each month. My duties there are not to interfere with my duties as a militia rifleman (though Capt. Hallock has agreed to make accommodations as need be, as he's as averse to starving as anyone). Some things will be discussed in staff meetings that should not be spoken of outside the room. Don't expect regular compensation, though it may be arranged where possible.

This is going to be fun.

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Sunday evening, February 20th, 2011*<strong>

Tired.

Went to the evening service with Pastor Jennifer, spoke to her at length afterwards. Told her about how I've been spending more time in the Bible lately. Still having trouble with the parts of it—especially a few parts of the Old Testament—but the words of Christ bring me a great deal of comfort in these times.

Got to admit that as a Catholic, albeit a very lapsed one, having a female pastor strikes me as incredibly strange. I nonetheless like what I've heard from Jennifer so far. Asked her if she though Catholics would go to Heaven; she laughed and said that anyone who accepts the Son of God as their savior will be saved by Him.

Then I asked her if Spiders go to Heaven. That, she noted, was a very good question. We were both a bit too fatigued for xenotheology at that time. She suggested I come to the Bible Study group, and they would discuss it in further detail.

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Morning, February 21st, 2011*<strong>

My grandfather was the son of South Carolina sharecroppers before becoming a successful businessman in Chicago. He would often warn me, should I ever decide to settle down in the South, to be wary of an accursed pestilence that dwells within the soil. That pestilence is called Kudzu.

Originally introduced in the 1930's from Japan[1], it was intended as a means of controlling the erosion of the soil, fatigued as it was by decades of intensive agriculture. It thrived in this climate and started choking out the indigenous flora. Some of the people I've talked to say that a fresh Kudzu shoot can grow more than a foot a day in optimal condition, but surely that's an exaggeration.[2] Irregardless, the people down here have spent millions of dollars and spilled rivers of herbicide fighting a seemingly futile war against it. I do hope the we can do better against the latest invasive species…

Still, Southerners have always been good at turning their lemons into lemonade. Livestock love kudzu, and unleashing a herd of goats on blighted property is just about the only marginally effective way to get rid of it. Machine bailing of the vine is rather difficult, otherwise it might have found ready use as pasturage. Humans can also eat it: the young leaves can be used like spinach, salad, quiche, or collard greens, the bigger leaves can be boiled and eaten. the shoots can be stir-fried, and the blossoms can be used to make jelly or wine. The vines are not edible, but they can be used for cordage or weaving, similar to hemp. The roots have large, nutritious tubers which can be powdered for use as thickener—these used to command high prices in health-food stores and had been researched for supposed medicinal properties, including the possibility that Kudzu powder might be used to cure alcoholism.

Sergeant Skitter rounded up a few of the company's camp followers and sent them out with shovels and hoes to collect roots. Off they went, muttering darkly, and back they came, still muttering, with fifteen pounds each of the woody tubers. Skitter then had each of them wash their harvest, peel it, cut into eighth-inch cubes, run through a meat grinder, combined with twice it's volume of water, and poured into a bucket through a strainer. The fibrous substance that didn't go through the strainer was put in a second bucket, where one gallon of water was added. The fiber was stirred, removed, hand-squeezed over the bucket and discarded. The liquid was then strained into the first bucket. A filter consisting of a dishtowel or t-shirt was then put over the now-empty second bucket and the kudzu juice was poured through it, to further remove the wood fibers. This bucket was then allowed to stand for a day in a cold, out-of-the-way place. The liquid was then removed and a layer of brown, clay-like starch remained on the bottom. This was broken up and cold water was poured into the bucket, forming a solution. This was again left to sit for a day, the water was poured out, the kudzu starch was broken up and poured into a one gallon jar. The bucket was rinsed out and the rinse was poured into the jar as well. The starch was stirred into solution, the jar was filled with cold water and allowed to stand in a cold place for two days.

Finally, the water was poured off, any upper-layer impurities were removed, and only clean white starch remained. This was used today to create a kind of meal cake which I found to be very good. The camp followers even quit complaining when Skitter gave them first dibs.

So, could this potential cure for alcoholism also serve as a cure for famine? Probably not, says Skitter. It'll help, but it's just too labor-intensive to be a practical means of feeding entire armies.[3] I asked him if there was any way to upscale the process. He said there was a means of doing so (rural Japanese actually did once use Kudzu as a means of fighting famine, he noted) but he didn't know how. Perhaps that's something we should look into.

* * *

><p>1. Not entirely true. Kudzu was first introduced in 1876, used as an ornamental and garden plant for several years thereafter, and planted in earnest in the 1930's. My great-grandfather was actually paid to plant it in lieu of tobacco; the government didn't stop paying until the 1950's, but by then everyone except the government knew not to plant the stuff. It didn't make it on the Federal Noxious Weed List until 1997.<p>

2. No, that's not an exaggeration.

3. Such seems to be the greatest problem with Kudzu. It has a great deal of potential uses, but requires more effort than most can or want to put into making it useful (that, and it's not quite as densely-growing of a plant as it may appear). Generally, anywhere that kudzu could be grown in harvestable quantities, something else can always be grown more efficiently. As with the aforementioned sorghum, a rapid demechanization of America could very well change this.


	7. Chapter 7: Enduring Freedom

_"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,  
>And the women come out to cut up what remains,<br>Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains  
>An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.<br>Go, go, go like a soldier,  
>Go, go, go like a soldier,<br>Go, go, go like a soldier,  
>Soldier of the Queen!"<em>  
>-Rudyard Kipling, The Young British Soldier<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*interlude*<br>**15 January, 2011**  
>Near Kabul city centre, Afghanistan<br>**

Afghanistan is a big country with a topography from a nightmare; it was not for no reason that they called their mountains the "Hindu Killers". Even the Red Hordes of Russia stretched themselves thin trying to occupy it. With indigenous resistance (or Western resolve) steadily winding down, those occupying it before the skies fell found themselves more and more widely dispersed. Who would have known that this might eventually turn out to be a good thing?

The International Security Assistance Force—and, for that matter, the Afghan National Army and the Taliban—had come through the orbital strikes relatively unscathed; taking ninety percent casualties when most armed forces had lost ninety-nine percent. The single mothership in the nation's capital had disgorged half a million skitters locally, with an equal number deployed on extermination sweeps and slave hunts within a one-hundred mile radius of the city.

The world's surviving military units, led by remnants of NATO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, settled upon a course of action within the first weeks of the war: they needed to hit back at the aliens and quickly—before they could gain a greater foothold on Earth, and before their own equipment started breaking down or their soldiers started starving.

That humanity's most dangerous nations had chosen to concentrate so much of their military might in a desiccated, resource scarce, primitive, and agrarian nation called Afghanistan would no doubt be a source of unending confusion for the alien commanders.[1] It was the one place where the aliens were weakest, and now the one place where humans were strongest. If conventional forces could win anywhere, it would be there.

* * *

><p>The alien aircraft began jinking wildly as three missiles shot up towards it. These craft were relatively slow in-atmosphere, and their electronic defense systems were several decades behind what the humans used; the missiles had no trouble finding their mark. The first one to hit, an RBS-70, didn't have a sufficiently large warhead to do any serious damage. The second one, a Strela 2SA-7, was spoofed by the evasive manoeuvres (that, or it had been improperly targeted, or it was so old that the seeker no longer functioned) and flew off harmlessly towards the sun. The third missile, an older and bigger MIM-23, tore off a significant section of the starboard wing, causing the plane to go down. One down; fifty four thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine to go.

Hamid Mahmud Hotak cursed as the bomber's energy weapon washed over his Ilga team and lit up the infidels' Wiesel 2 Air Defence Weapon Carrier. Well, that's it for their air defense. Some of his fellow mujahids responded with angry bursts small arms fire, but he was disciplined enough to know that there was better uses for his ammunition. He rounded the corner of a crumbling brick building and opened up with his AKSU-74 on a mob of the alien grunts as they ran towards him. A few went down, but more kept coming. One grabbed a hold of a nearby human and snapped his neck, moving to the next and crushing his windpipe with what seemed like trifling ease. Hamid aimed for their legs, managing to slow them enough to start moving backwards. He fired and backtracked, switching to his Nagant revolver when the carbine ran empty and wishing all the while that he had a grenade. The last alien was about to reach his throat when a PKM stitched it's torso and face with bullets. Hamid breathed a sigh of relief and stood in shock. He gave thanks to God that his death may be delayed for just a little longer.

Second Lieutenant Vanessa Bovee of the Georgia National Guard grabbed the dazed haji and pushed him down a narrow alleyway. The area where he had just been standing was bathed in white-hot flames as the plasma round of an alien tank burned through the surrounding structures like white phosphorous. They both hugged the ground as the hulking monster made its way towards them.

"You got grenades?" asked Vanessa, hoping she had run across one of the anglophones.

"Um, no." replied Hamid, not sure if he should be speaking to an Agent of the Great Satan, knowing that he shouldn't be speaking to a woman, but preferring the company of human devils to those from Outer Space.

"Well shucks, son. You see any way out of here?"

He didn't, and the tank was pushing its arm into the alley for the kill shot. Both heard and felt the explosion, but in the days or weeks—or maybe just seconds—following the blast, they were a little surprised not to be standing before the Great White Throne of Judgment (or, perhaps, awaiting Yawm al-Qiyāmah).

"Lieutenant Bovee, ISAF is falling back." called out a voice with a slight French accent. She looked up to see a Canadian soldier on the roof above them with a smoking M72 LAW. "That new boyfriend of yours knows how to fight, why don't you bring him with us?"

* * *

><p>Vanessa scanned the city from an upper room with her binoculars. Enemy craft filled the sky, tanks roamed the streets, and the area was covered in grunts. Kabul itself had taken a worse beating than anything the Coalition, the Taliban, the Soviets, or the British had ever delivered. Hugala Khan[2] may have been worse... maybe.<p>

They had fought well. The streets flowed with alien blood and the mothership sported several fires and blast holes from anything that could reach it. Large pieces had even broken off and fallen to earth, crushing buildings and people like some kind of twisted Chicken Little prophecy. They had fought well; it was a shame they wouldn't win.

"Look over there, Sergeant. Ain't that the local schoolhouse?" asked Lieutenant Bovee

"I think it is," said the sniper, turning his McMillan Tac-50 in that direction "What the devil are they... oh God!"

The school housed some 200 students on a normal day. At present, there were about 50 inside, all seemingly unconscious and being pulled out by alien grunts and their child-zombies.

"God Almighty! Is there anything we can do?" he asked, almost pleading. He and many others present had often visited the school and developed quite a fondness for the students; some of the soldiers had even helped build it. She was the ranking officer, and knew that at her command they would charge the aliens and retake that building, at bayonet-point if necessary.

Her orders were to remain in place. It was the most logical course of action; probably the only one that would allow them to escape the city alive, but it was a decision that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

When night fell, they and another, predominately British force joined together and managed to steal a bus. Before dawn they joined a large motorcade heading out of the city: Americans, Afghans, Canadians, Britons, Danes, Greeks, Germans, Russians, Slovaks, Czechs, Poles, Luxembourgians and others in an equally polyglot assortment of antique vehicles. Their own transports had been rendered useless by the super-EMPs or lost in the counterattacks of the last few days.

As they passed within half a kilometer of what was once Kabul International Airport, they could still feel the heat, smell the ozone and see the bluish glow above the crater that now took its place; the orbital strikes had been nothing if not thorough. They had hit the Taliban too, of course, slagging hideouts that had sometimes been hidden literally under the noses of Coalition Forces for the past decade.

Farther down the road was an ad hoc squadron of about a dozen tanks: Abrams and Challengers, Leopards and Brezhnevs[3]. Teams of bulldozers were being used to push them into prepared ambush positions—it didn't look good on the treads, but that hardly mattered. The dozers piled dirt over the front of the steel beasts as workers drained the fuel and stripped them of machine-guns, excess ammunition, and anything else that might be of future use. The mission of the tankers was to fire off one, two, maybe three shots and then bail out and hoof it before the alien tanks fired on them at full power and cut through their armour like a plasma torch through butter.

How did that saying go? "Out of commission, become a pillbox; out of ammo, become a bunker; out of time, become heroes." It occurred to her that this was probably the largest single collection of "functional" main battle tanks in the world.

* * *

><p><strong>16 January, 2011<strong>

It was too cold to sleep, and one quickly tires of looking out the window at a mosaic of rocky brown/grey nothingness dotted with run-down houses and farms on a ever-climbing road in such disrepair that a good runner could keep up with the vehicles. Vanessa looked instead at the faces of the soldiers and civilians packed in with her. Many looked dazed, a few were or had been crying—she couldn't blame them; they didn't need radios to know how the other planned assaults around the world had gone. If conventional forces can't win here, they can't win anywhere.

"This has to be the worst defeat since Cumberland College versus Georgia Tech."[4] she said to no one in particular.

"Oh, it ain't that bad" quipped a fellow guardsmen. "More like Georgia Tech versus everyone and anyone since then."

Vanessa the Yellowjacket glared at the Bulldog, almost laughing at the thought of Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate surviving an alien apocalypse.

"Jayhawk Wars."[5] interjected a third soldier, an RAF boffin, blankly. "We should have expected this, but now... well, what are we going to do now? Good God, what are we going to do now?"

Vanessa looked over at Hamid and his countrymen. Their forces were at least as physically shaken as those of the West, but they seemed to be doing much better psychologically. Small wonder, really; Afghans were, in her opinion, overrated as soldiers, but what they lacked in fire discipline, marksmanship or tactics, they more than made up for in endurance. As far as they were concerned, this was just another group of invaders in a land that had been the bane of invaders since Alexander the Great.

"What we're going to do" she said, nodding towards the Afghans, "is start learning a thing to two from them."

* * *

><p>1. If they study our history, they might make references to the Silk Road. Afghanistan actually is somewhat important geographically.<p>

2. That one managed to do what American presidents could only dream of: ruling all of Afghanistan and most of Iraq. Granted, he did it by making pyramids from the skulls of those who opposed him.

3. T-62's may actually be resistant to an EMP, as I think they originally used vacuum-tube technology for their electronics, much like the Russian MiGs of the period.

4. Football reference. A 1916 Cumberland College vs. Georgia Tech game which ended 220 to 0 for Tech, it was one of the most decisive victories in American football history.

5. Footfall reference. In the Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle novel, the alien Fithp land troops in Kansas and are counterattacked by a National Guard armored cavalry troop. They use orbital lasers and kinetic energy strikes to repel the humans, and after doing the same to three armoured divisions, the US opts to nuke them. That actually works, though the Fithp are amazed that we would be so stupid as to set off fission weapons in our one and only biosphere.


	8. Chapter 8: Through Their Eyes

_"Aliens are never alien."_  
>-Arthur C Clarke<p>

* * *

><p>"Ooof, ouch! Comrade, help me!"<p>

"Easy, don't move or you'll break a leg. Here you go, watch your step next time."

"Thank you. What in the Unknown Void is that?"

"A burrow, sir. Small creatures on this world dig them as a form of shelter. Those and other hazards are very difficult to see in amongst all this 'Kudzu'."

"Diabolical weed."

"You should come back here in the summer—I can't see how the farmers keep it under control. Whatever techniques they employ, perhaps we can put them to our own use."

"Maybe, possibly... you always were too pensive for the military caste."

"Well, I've been thinking: this world and the things on it are indeed different, but they're also oddly familiar."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, take this Kudzu, or that weeping willow tree. They're strange plants, stranger than anything we could have ever before envisioned, but they're not beyond our comprehension. And take the structures they build; they're completely unlike anything our engineers would ever design, but the engineering itself is fairly basic. The questions of human anatomy have caused mental and physical harm to the minds of our medical caste—it's doubtful we'll ever be able to make augments of those who aren't in the adolescent stage of development— but with enough study, the questions we have are gradually being answered. The way they behave in battle is... bizarre, but there is some form of logical thought that we, with further research, should have little trouble understanding."

"One would expect aliens to be more alien, would one not?"

"Well, perhaps. Then again, before we confirmed the existence of life on other worlds, many of our own philosophers believed that any such life would either be too advanced or too primitive for significant interaction. 'When we find life on other worlds, we will find beasts or gods, but not sapients.' was the conventional wisdom. We now know this to be false, so where else were we wrong?"

"We have many things to learn; as do they."

"Yes... it is funny isn't it? At least we took intelligent extraterrestrials as a given, even before we had confirmation; and here they still question the existence of life beyond the ones they've already encountered.. It's a shame our leadership was not willing to be more forthcoming... if only they were allowed to know our true purpose here, it seems most unlikely that they would resist..."[1]

* * *

><p>1. Imagining a conversation between two of the aliens. For this chapter, I was inspired by another fanfic writer who had some very interesting ideas as to why we've really been invaded:<p>

fanfiction -dot- net /s/7213658/1/Magnum

(Fanfiction's spam filter is more than a little annoying... then again, spam is even more annoying...)

Update: this was written before season 2 and obviously got a few things wrong, but it still seems possible that the Espheni think they're somehow "improving" our species, regardless of whether or not we want to be improved (another issue upon which upon which CS Lewis spoke so insightfully). Just take the Green Man's Burden and add a... rather regrettable ratio of Broken Eggs to Omelets.

That, I think, is one of the more existentially terrifying motivations for an invasion.


	9. Chapter 9: Camp Followers

_"There are those who say: 'I am a farmer', or, 'I am a student'; 'I can discuss literature but not military arts.' This is incorrect. There is no profound difference between the farmer and the soldier. You must have courage. You simply leave your farms and become soldiers. That you are farmers is of no difference, and if you have education, that is so much the better. When you take your arms in hand, you become soldiers; when you are organized, you become military units._

_All the people of both sexes from the ages of sixteen to forty-five must be organized into anti-Japanese self-defence units, the basis of which is voluntary service. As a first step, they must procure arms, then they must be given both military and political training. Their responsibilities are: local sentry duties, securing information of the enemy, arresting traitors, and preventing the dissemination of enemy propaganda. When the enemy launches a guerrilla-suppression drive, these units, armed with what weapons there are, are assigned to certain areas to deceive, hinder, and harass him. Thus, the defence units assist the combatant guerrillas. They have other functions. They furnish stretcher-bearers to transport the wounded , carriers to take food to the troops, and comfort missions to provide the troops with tea and rice."_

-Mao Zedung, On Guerrilla Warfare

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Evening, February 22nd, 2011*<strong>

I touched on this yesterday: we're taking an increasing number of refugees under our wing who we can't really use, at least not in the killing of spiders: too young, too old, too infirm, too crazy, too stupid, not crazy or stupid enough. It used to be that we would pull them from the jaws of the spiders, and high command or various charity groups would get them settled, but it seems to be taking longer and longer to find places for them, just as our supply convoys are becoming more and more sparse. Perhaps this is the start of the Starving Times that we predicted.

We have a new semi-official fixer: John Toland, older gentleman, an automotives master mechanic by trade, but he knows a good bit about bicycles, radios, guns and anything else that might need fixing. When he saw how threadbare our clothing was, he immediately went to work as a tailor, borrowing Skitter's work crew to set up his own little sweatshop. His age makes him unable to serve in combat, which might prevent him from suffering the same fate as the man he replaces.

In G Coy, as in most of the militia units, everyone who is deemed physically and mentally capable of using a gun is taught how to do so, even children. [Addendum: I don't really mind, as we very seldom arm children under the age of eight and that's not much younger than I was when I first went hunting with my dad. I would have once found it highly objectionable for us to subject them to paramilitary training, but under present conditions I feel it's better to have their childhoods shattered than to be harnessed. On that note, only under the most extreme circumstances will we send the potentially-harnessable into battle—to do otherwise would be the utmost of stupidity][1] We may not plan on putting them in combat, but that might not stop combat from coming to them. So in a manner of speaking, the dichotomy between a proactive and reactive militia remains.[2]

I've been ordered to provide Toland with basic firearms training, and he'll eventually be issued a weapon of his own. More importantly, I am to re-educate him in the classification of our enemies: the sexapedal aliens are spiders, not lobsters; the bipedal aliens are robots, not walkers; the flying machines are fighters, not saucers; the thing their building downtown is a tower, not a base; and the things they're strapping to our kids are...

...actually, pretty much everyone calls those things harnesses. Go figure.

Anyway, we both went to the range today. He seems to have an affinity for lever-action rifles as that, apart from muzzleloaders, is what he had the most experience with as a teenager and young adult. We started him out with a .22 and, while he hasn't fired a gun in almost 45 years, he did reasonably well with it. He did fine with the .243 too, but when we moved up to .35 we started having problems. I think he's scared of the recoil; we'll try and work on that later but Lieutenant Hallock doesn't want us expending too much militarily useful ammunition so we may not get to do this as much as we would like.

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Afternoon, February 23rd, 2011*<strong>

Volunteered for a scavenging run into the city. Didn't find any of the books I wanted, but we got a decent haul of food, fuel and medical materials.

Ran into a detachment from the 3rd Regiment, also scavenging from further south. We updated them on how the Battle of Candler-McAfee went, they updated us on the fighting in the south:

College Park is still in human hands, and they've done a great deal to push the aliens out of Hapeville as well. East Point is still theirs and several attempts to retake it have been bloodily repulsed, but there's a small group of human resistors at the rail yard south of where Fort McPherson used to be—the Spiders seem to like rail yards and are very reluctant to bomb them, so they make excellent redoubts if you don't plan on escaping. There's renewed fighting in West End and Mechanicsville; resistance forces hope to put the squeeze on the alien's Lee Street/Downtown Connector Corridor.

3rd Regiment is centered in Westview, and they've been holding the Westview Cemetery against a major spider advance. While our enemy has no problem bombing cemeteries (Philistines!), their ground forces seem to be having an awful lot of trouble finding their way through the thicker portions of it. The people we talked to expect to inflict a great many casualties there, even though they'll eventually be forced out. Well, my prayers are with them.

* * *

><p>1. I touched on this in on of the earlier chapters. Child soldiersworkers make sense and I appreciate Spielberg's people having the guts to include them. However, child soldiers in FRONT-LINE duties are a little harder to justify. As for the split between soldiers and civilians, I really can't see any excuse for it. If there's any division at all, it should be between soldiers and rear-echelon soldiers.

2. In real life, the FBI/ATF/whatever generally makes a distinction between those militia groups that may initiate violence and warrant being spied on (proactive) and the ones who are willing to wait for the NWO/Forces of Darkness/whatever to come after them (reactive) and are unlikely to cause trouble. The latter are by far the most common, but the former tend to make the headlines (even in those "lulzfests" of informants entrapping informants, which is what both the recent Hutaree Militia and the Arizona Viper Militia of 90's fame seem to have been).


	10. Chapter 10: McAfee Road Heroes

_"On one end of the spectrum, ranks of electronic boxes buried deep in the earth hungrily consume data and spew out endless tapes. Scientists and engineers confer in air-conditioned offices; missiles are checked by intense men who move about them silently, almost reverently. In forty minutes, countdown begins._

_At the other end of this spectrum, a tired man wearing a greasy felt hat, a tattered shirt, and soiled shorts is seated, his back against a tree. Barrel pressed between his knees, butt resting on the moist earth between his sandaled feet, is a Browning automatic rifle. Hooked to his belt, two dirty canvas sacks–one containing three homemade bombs, the other ten magazines filled with .30 ammunition. Draped around his neck is a cloth tube containing three days' supply of rice. The man stands, raises a water bottle to his lips, rinses his mouth and spits out the water. He slaps the stock of the browning three times, pauses, and slaps it again two times. He disappears into the shadows. In forty minutes, his group of fifteen men will occupy a previously prepared ambush."_  
>–Samuel B. Griffith<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*Interlude*<br>20 February, 2011  
>Candler-McAfee, Atlanta, Georgia, USA<strong>

"Hey Clif, once more unto the breach?"  
>"Yup." responded Robert Williams Clifton, disinterestedly.<br>"Or close the wall up with our English dead?"  
>"But we ain't got no English here, April."<br>"What? Homes, I thought you was supposed to be smart."  
>"I may know bugs but that don't mean I know no poetry."<p>

"Hey you two, hush!"

The squad was hunkered in the dark morning twilight behind a brick foundation where a house once stood. Many buildings in the area had been destroyed in wildfires since the invasion, but not this one. Across the street from them was an apartment building with a twenty foot wide hole seared cleanly into one side and out the other (if one were to take a walk through the building, he might still find a thin layer of ash on every floor; remnants of any organic material therein at the moment of impact)[1]. Behind them was a thirty foot long trench in the earth, where the energy weapon had kept going until it hit the granite bedrock (said granite having melted and rehardened as a pool of rhyolite at the bottom of the trench). Clifton wasn't sure if physics should have allowed for all that, but so it was.

Sounds of war could be heard all around, but the fighting was at lull at this particular area. As they waited in silence for the signal to strike, Clifton wondered if alien warriors ever got those same "uneasy feelings" that humans did.

The bugle blared. Clifton leapt from cover and cut loose into the nearest band of warriors. An eagle cocktail[2] landed next to one of the drones and detonated, blinding and crippling it. The aliens fell back, and the humans pursued.

As his band rounded a street corner, Clifton heard a rustling and turned to see multiple warriors charging towards them. He threw himself into reverse, but others weren't quick enough. One warrior hit two men in a flurry of movement, taking off a head and sending other parts flying. Another human was lifted off the ground and thrown into a nearby oak tree with a sickening snap.

The ghost of John Moses Browning did not like this at all, and responded to telling effect. But as the third warrior went down, his venerable design exposed one of its few flaws.

Empty magazine, no time to reload, and having broken the bayonet in an earlier engagement, Clifton produced a Glock 17 in his right hand and fired it into the face of the enemy. Still shooting and scooting, he shouldered his BAR and drew a reproduction Remington M1858 revolver[3] with his left hand, firing that as the Glock ran empty.

Clifton was one man amongst many in one unit amongst many, but at that moment he felt like the last man on earth fighting an endless alien horde. Everything inside him screamed to throw down his guns and run, but he knew from experience that to lose his head was to lose his life.

And so he kept it. Even as the alien forces closed in on him, even as the plasma beam of a drone bisected April and splattered her blood across his side, even as a stricken warrior grasped his leg, tearing through clothing and flesh as it dropped to the ground. Even as he tripped and hit the ground, he stuck another cylinder into the revolver and coolly delivered six more rounds into the forces descending upon him.

* * *

><p>The last skirmish before sunrise may not have been the hardest part of the battle, but it did seem like the most memorable. The enemy had reacted with uncharacteristic vitality in dealing with the ambush. Maybe he was right about "uneasy feelings", maybe the warriors were learning, or maybe they realized that the bipeds would want to get another good blow in before the sun came up and had anticipated it.<p>

The day wore on and evening came. Scouts returned to report most enemy troops falling back to something close to their original lines. It wasn't really a victory, but it wasn't a defeat either.

Clifton found himself in the stretcher corps after his own injuries had been dealt with. As he loaded some of his comrades into the 8th Regiment's wagons for transport to the field hospitals, he noticed quite a few Confederate Battle Flags affixed to them. This might have made him uneasy once, but now it was if anything amusing; his own ancestors had fought alongside Harriet Tubman, but surely she and General Hood were rooting for his side this time.

A cold wind blew down from the north and on it was the smell of smoke and the sound of distant gunfire. Peace had come to Candler-McAfee, but the Battle for Atlanta continued.

* * *

><p>1. When asked why there were so few corpses in the wake of an invasion that reportedly destroyed 90% of humanity, the producers claimed that the alien Super E-Bombs dropped on the major cities were also Super N-Bombs that left the buildings standing but turned any mammal within a hundred miles into soup. I think I know the real reason why we don't see lots of rotting corpses on a daytime TV series: but let's take this one at face value.<p>

Between Boston and Worchester, wouldn't that kill pretty much everyone in Massachusetts? Is the 2nd Mass really a bunch of transplanted Vermonters, or have we been watching a series about vengeance-seeking ghosts? (That would be really cool, by the way.)

Anyway, my personal theory is that most of humanity died by more conventional means. There's violence of course, but a breakdown in international commerce means a very large chunk of humanity starves to death. Disease and exposure will likewise do plenty to thin down the population. As for the bodies, well, Skitters do try to clean them for reasons unknown (food source?), but let's just say that typhus is quite a problem in my version of Falling Skies.

2. A plastic or rubberized bag filled with flamable fluids with a smoke grenade and thermite grenade tied to it and a wire tied to the safety pins of the grenades. Pull the wire and throw. Essentially a super-molotov; probably not the most effective of weapons against mechs unless they're hand-placed.

3. I'm definitely a luddite when it comes to firearms, but there are a few good reasons why one might prefer a ball-and-cap revolver. They tend to have larger bores and more knockdown power than modern autoloaders, the good reproductions are quite hardy in construction, and black powder is easier to produce on a small scale.


	11. Chapter 11: Do Skitters go to Heaven?

_"If I remember rightly, St. Augustine raised a question about the theological position of satyrs, monopods, and other semi-human creatures. He decided it could wait till we knew there were any. So can this._

_'But supposing' you say. 'Supposing all these embarrassing suppositions turned out to be true?' I can only record a conviction that they won't; a conviction which has for me become in the course of years irresistible. Christians and their opponents again and again expect that some new discovery will either turn matters of faith into matters of knowledge or else reduce them to patent absurdities. But it has never happened._

_What we believe always remains intellectually possible; it never becomes intellectually compulsive. I have an idea that when this ceases to be so, the world will be ending. We have been warned that all but conclusive evidence against Christianity, evidence that would deceive (if it were possible) the very elect, will appear with the Antichrist._

_And after that there will be wholly conclusive evidence on the other side._

_But not, I fancy, till then on either side."_

-C.S. Lewis, The World's Last Night[1]

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Thursday Morning, February 24th, 2011*<strong>

I went to Jennifer's Bible Study last night. It was held in the school auditorium; about 25 people in attendance, with 15 or so taking an active part in the discussion.

We started off with a study of the Ammonites and their relations with the ancient Hebrews. I have to admit that I really didn't pay as much attention as I should have as I was still exhausted from the day's work and the caffeine hadn't kicked in yet.

In the second half of the meeting, Jennifer brought up the theological question that I asked her a few nights back: whether or not Spiders go to heaven. It apparently hasn't been the first time her study group has gone over this question, and pretty much everyone has one idea or another.

Let me start with what we all agree on. Pretty much all of us, or at least everyone who spoke up, agreed that the Spiders are mortal creatures of natural origin. What we mean by natural is that they are not supernatural; we don't think they're angels or demons or figments of the human Id made corporeal (one of the women present knew someone who had suggested the latter— ok, so why is a rouge portion of our own brains trying to steal our children?). And by mortal, what we mean is they are not immortal or nonmortal; their existences have a definite start, an ending, and the time in between is governed by the same physical laws as ours.

Working from these pre-established beliefs, there's a few more questions we have to ask about our new arrivals. First of all, do they have souls? The majority opinion seems to be that they're definitely sapient, and this would imply the presence of a soul. Some argued that spiders might lack souls despite their sapience, and others believe that they have neither souls nor sapience. Under this belief, they're nothing but highly-intelligent animals or automatons (speaking of which, Tammy and her husband believe that the robots might be sapient and therefore have souls too; I never thought of that).[2]

For the sake of argument, let's assume that they do have souls. Can we say for certain they ever suffered a fall from grace, as humanity did? This is a bit of a moot point; I think almost everyone agrees that their actions have been very far from what you would expect of an unfallen species. We did touch on the possibility of still-unknown races who may indeed be unfallen and there was quite a bit of discussion on one side or the other. Personally, I agree with someone who said that if two suffered the Fall, then a third probably would have as well.

So, perhaps they have souls and those souls are lost, have they been denied redemption through the sacrifice of God's son? Or, did Christ incarnate to, as C.S. Lewis suggested, minister upon and resurrect from their world as well as ours? The answer that most of the congregants, being as they are rather conservative Baptists and Methodists and Pentecostals, is a definite yes to the first question. As for the second one, the idea that Christ would have had to die and resurrect on two different worlds is about as palatable as the idea the Christ would have had to die and resurrect[3] on two different continents.[4]

Lastly, if one assumes that they have souls but are presently without God's grace and in need of it, could there be any path to Him apart from the resurrection? Well... this one strikes at some very fundamental differences between my beliefs and what most of my comrades believe, and I'm not going to belabor the point.[5] I'm just going to say that I think it could be possible, and the others... don't.

For the record, the Vatican did once declare that intelligent life might possibly exist on other planets, and that alien beings could theoretically be accepted into the Church one day. My parents were both science fiction fans who thought that aliens probably existed and may have even visited earth in the past or present, though I never asked them what theological implications this might have. I never read much science fiction (at least nothing more modern than Wells or Vernes; I preferred the classics), never thought much about aliens and, if pressed, would have probably said that I didn't believe in them. So I guess there's always room for argument.

Oddly enough, I spoke to one man who still maintains that intelligent life originating elsewhere in THIS universe is unlikely, and the Spiders are probably extra-dimensional rather than extra-terrestrial. Interesting hypothesis, but I'm really not sure why it would matter.

So, as to my original question, I guess the answer is going to be a resounding "maybe".

* * *

><p>1. Lewis was hardly the first well-known theologian to toy with the idea of contact with extraterrestrials (that, I think, would have been John Milton) but Religion and Rocketry is a must-read for anyone interested in the theological problems it might present.<p>

2. Frankly, theological issues over highly-intelligent robots strike me as a more pressing concern than theological issues over highly-intelligent aliens.

3. Many Protestants would likely see the idea of aliens "crucify[ing] to themselves the Son of God afresh" (Hebrews 6:6, 1611KJV) as borderline-blasphemous. I wouldn't, but I would see it as incorrect.

4. Apologies to any Mormon readers. Interestingly enough, the Book of Mormon does quite strongly imply that aliens exist. See Moses 1:33-37 and Doctrine and Covenants 76:23-24.

Somewhat related: Ellen G White also wrote of extraterrestrials in Christian Experience and Teachings (CET 97.3-99.2). While her prose here is somewhat less decisive (they could just be angels), pretty much every Seventh-Day Adventist that I've spoken to seems to take it as a given that life exists on other planets.

5. Many post-Vatican II Catholics, Sarah included, believe that God can save whomever he wants in whichever manner he chooses, not just through the atonement of sins by Jesus Christ. Most Evangelicals, myself included, believe that salvation is found only through Christ and all people will be give an account based on their obedience to the teachings of Christ as they knew it. But what about those who've never heard of or can't understand the Bible: children, the mentally handicapped, people in non-Christian societies, extraterrestrials? Oceans of ink have been spilled arguing over that question and no one's opinion is going to be changed by the footnote of a Falling Skies fanfiction. Suffice to say: one does not seek to be found until he knows that he is lost.


	12. Chapter 12: The Fat of the Land

_"Then hear thou in heaven, and forgive the sin of thy servants, and of thy people Israel, that thou teach them the good way wherein they should walk, and give rain upon thy land, which thou hast given to thy people for an inheritance._

_If there be in the land famine, if there be pestilence, blasting, mildew, locust, or if there be caterpiller; if their enemy besiege them in the land of their cities; whatsoever plague, whatsoever sickness there be;_

_What prayer and supplication so ever be made by any man, or by all thy people Israel, which shall know every man the plague of his own heart, and spread forth his hands toward this house:_

_Then hear thou in heaven thy dwelling place, and forgive, and do, and give to every man according to his ways, whose heart thou knowest; (for thou, even thou only, knowest the hearts of all the children of men; )_

_That they may fear thee all the days that they live in the land which thou gavest unto our fathers."_

-1 Kings 8:36-40

* * *

><p><strong>*interlude*<br>28 February, 2011  
>Chattahoochee National Forest, north of Dahlonega, Georgia, USA<br>**

"Hey, Heather, how come we can't have four-wheelers?" asked one of the men as he dismounted to push his bicycle up the muddy incline. "Derek's squad has 'em."

"Hey, Justin, how come you can't shut up?" responded the woman, somewhat playfully.

"...now, now—play nice, children..." interjected Brandon Elliot, the squad leader.

"Derek's squad has the whole county to cover," she continued. "and they tend to get shot at more often than us. Now, we could maybe have horses if they thought you had sense enough to handle one."

"...and if they weren't afraid of refugees trying to eat them." noted Brandon.

In 1861, the Blue Ridge Rifles was organized in Lumpkin County as a unit of Confederate volunteers. In 1950, it was recreated as a precision drill team at North Georgia College and State University. It's latest incarnation served as the local militia.

The county had boasted a large military contingent in the form of the Ranger Mountain Training School and the aforementioned NGCSU, a senior military college. While orbital strikes had slagged both, there had been survivors off-base as well as the sizable ex-military retiree population who tend to congregate around such places; these were used as a cadre for a new Rifles. Most made their way to Atlanta as part of the Georgia Militia, the remainder were deputized and kept in Lumpkin under the auspices of the Sheriff's Office.

Their duties included defense against alien raiders, defense against human marauders, and humanitarian assistance to the civilian population. Raiders hadn't been an issue since the ships left earlier that month and marauders were starting to die out or settle down, so focus had shifted to the third task.

Adequate housing was a serious problem, even with the immigration restrictions. In addition to fleeing Atlantans, many of the modern houses built in the local subdivisions weren't designed with long-term power outage in mind, and the number of heating and cooking fires led to quite a few of these burning to the ground.[1] Emergency shelters filled within days, so Lumpkin County residents opened their homes to homeless neighbours and strangers alike. When this couldn't hold them all, they were settled into foreclosed and abandoned houses, then into the schools and churches, then into any suitable business or public building. For those with no other choice, and for those who preferred the cold to the crowds, there were the campgrounds of the National Forests.

* * *

><p>"What is it?" asked one of the campers, her tired and sunken eyes staring uneasily at the bowl before her.<p>

"Stew." responded Brandon, dispensing more of the steaming substance from the metal canisters on the back of his bicycle trailer.

"What's in it?"

"Rabbit."[2]

"Rabbit?"

"Yep."

He didn't like lying, but she needed the protein and he wasn't going to watch the girl die from squeamishness; it had been hard enough convincing her to eat rabbit. At first he wasn't sure if they were going to buy it, but either way she and her campmates were soon eating.

Brandon had just about finished his rounds by mid-day. The situation was typical: there had been some more reports of theft, another (justifiable) shooting, some new health problems, and of course some more requests for blankets, raincoats, water and food. In a secluded shed near one of the last campsites, the squad was met with one rather interesting spectacle.

Donald Kasparek was a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, wearing an army surplus jacket and homemade moccasins. His Bronx accent betrayed that he wasn't indigenous to the area, but he had definitely gone feral. He lived alone in a cabin in the woods and had a reputation as a crazy hermit, though Brandon's dad knew him well and liked him. Ever since the invasion, he had become a common sight among the refugees, offering advice, giving tips on trapping and foraging, and delivering anonymous gifts from a forest that to most seemed devoid of anything larger than field mice.

"And what have we here?" asked Brandon.

"Well, what's it look like?" countered Donald Kasparek, a coy smirk on his weathered face.

What it looked like was a cow, or at least the front third of one. Donald had found it in the burned-out ruins of a nearby barn, partially protected from fire and scavengers by collapsed timbers. It's red coat had been singed to black and brown, and the bugs were just starting their work of decomposing it.

"How long do you think it's been dead?" asked Brandon

"Eh, three or four days, it's in good shape thanks to the cool weather we've been having."

"But not exactly without blemish, is it?"[3] asked Heather, holding a hand over her nose.

"No, no it ain't." replied Brandon "But for our purposes, it may be just what we need."

Justin looked at him quizzically.

"Brandon, what do you mean?"

He shrugged.

"Oh God. You ain't suggesting we...?"

"Why not? Tainted meat is perfectly edible provided you boil it long enough."

"Try telling me that after your bout of beaver fever."

"Historically, slightly ripened game was considered a something of a delicacy, and for some folks it still is." said Donald. "Ever hear of Kimchi? Or Guram?"[4]

"...cheese? Yoghurt? Wine?" added Heather.

"As part of their training, the Rhodesian Selous Scouts were required to shoot a baboon, leave it hanging from a pole for a week, and cook and eat it. Considering that no other food was provided during that week, w... they were generally quite happy to do so."

"Alright, fair enough." declared Justin. "But y'all can have my bowl of beef-and-maggot stew until I've gone a week or so without eating anything better."

"I could eat it if I hadn't had to smell it." said Heather. "But I think I'm going to have to hold out for our next trip to Bojangles too. And for that matter, if any of this goes to the refugees, it might be best that we keep its origins to ourselves."

"True; we don't want a Battleship Potemkin[5] on our hands." said Brandon.

"You know," said Donald, "if you guys let me keep the worst parts I might be able to exchange them for some nice big possums, maybe even some catfish."

"Now I could go for catfish."

* * *

><p>1. It's worrying how many people get burned or suffocated every time it gets cold in the South. People, who are otherwise often quite competent and intelligent, lose their homes and lives because they have less understanding of fire than a paleolithic child. And if living in such houses is difficult in the winter, it'll be unbearable come summer.<p>

2. "Roof rabbit" is what wartime Europeans might have called it, courtesy of the local pound. It's been said that America has a major problem with strays; under the right circumstances this problem could be seen as an opportunity. The Australian Aboriginals have engaged in ailurophagia for generations, and there's even talk of commercial harvesting there. Really, there's no logical reason to be willing to eat surplus feral pigs but not surplus feral cats (same goes for dogs).

3. Reference to the red heifer (parah adumah) that was sacrificed in the purification ritual of any ancient Israeli who had handled a corpse. A description of the practice is found in the 19th chapter of Numbers.

4. The previously-mentioned paleolithic child would have probably been familiar with the taste of rotten meat, as most predators (us included) are quite capable of eating carrion whenever their own efforts at hunting have failed. Human digestive systems are much stronger than we tend to give them credit. Kiviaq is another exotic dish of Inuit origin dish that's semi-famous for being semi-rotten. And, as Heather notes, we first-worlders eat lots of spoiled food too, we just don't call it that.

5. 1925 film based on a 1905 mutiny in the Russian navy, the spark of which was sailors being given maggot-infested meat.


	13. Chapter 13: Boredom

_"Since then we have been doing infantry work in the trenches. We have been out of work in our trenches; only shrapnel and snipers. Someone described this war as 'Months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.'"_  
>-English cavalry subaltern, 1914<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Saturday Evening, February 26th, 2011*<strong>

Pastor Jennifer left on Thursday to assist at funerals in another company; she won't get back till Tuesday and another minister will cover for her tomorrow. That's unfortunate, as I really wanted to ask her a few more theo/sociological questions I had. Should any attempts be made to contact and minister to the invaders (assuming it's possible),[1] and should their dead receive the same treatment as ours (assuming anyone can ever capture one of their corpses without being carpet-bombed)?[2]

Went on another scavenging run yesterday and finally found what I was looking for: books. I got a copy of the The Book of Kudzu: A Culinary & Healing Guide, by William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi. It includes some advice for upscaling root powder production to the level of a cottage industry, which should help Skitter tremendously.

I also found several old copies of Mother Earth News, singing the praises of their more famous Book of Tofu. Back then they seemed to think that we could end world hunger and live healthy and happy in a vegan utopia if only the world would resign itself to living by soy alone. Oh, how naive we were.[3]

Backwoods Home Magazine, MEN's right-wing equivalent, was also here and we grabbed several of those. There was still lots of room in my cart, and I got Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living, and a few of the venerable Foxfire Books. Both have been criticized for lack of depth, though I've always thought they made for great reference guides and my parents were fond of both. Left the Euell Gibbons books as we have plenty of foraging guides, even though they brought back fond memories of home.[4]

I found one other book that I had never heard of before, A Barefoot Doctors Manual. Looks like the kind of thing my brother would read (he went to med school; I didn't because I prefer to deal with equipment that doesn't talk, bleed, poop or give you hepatitis), and our medical staff will probably like it. Where There Is No Doctor/Dentist series was there too, but we already have some copies so we left them for future scavengers, ditto most of the gun guides and military field manuals. They had a good section on woodcrafting and sociology, but I didn't take any because I doubted I'd ever find time to read them. How wrong I was.

We found one other thing of note: several large boxes filled with disposable diapers. An odd find in a book store, especially given the hippyish nature of the reading material, but they didn't weigh much so we grabbed them too.[5] Our company doesn't have any babies present, but these can always be used to make bandages.

There was a brief rain at sunset, but it stopped an hour ago and we're now enveloped in fog, as we have been for the last few nights. Makes picket duty an eerie proposition, and I'm surprised no one's been shot with so many jumpy guards standing around.

The days are getting much warmer, and that's good because it means planting season will be here soon, and it might help the folks in Westview and elsewhere get a handle on their typhus epidemic. Of course, warm weather tends to bring a host of new problems; everyone's scared that anything from leprosy to plague to TB to MRSA could ravage us now that our medical infrastructure has been knocked back a century or two.

Fighting in East Point and Hapevile is winding down, Mechanicsville is quiet again, battle lines have solidified in Candler-McAfee, though fighting is heating up to the south of them in Panthersville. North Atlanta is still a weird seesaw of small groups fighting back and forth, with neither able or willing to commit enough troops to actually take and hold the contested ground. I am told the fighting and refighting in that region has turned much of it into quite the moonscape.

Probably for the best; Buckhead just won't be Buckhead now that all the idiotic fratboys and psycho yuppie drivers are dead.

And G Company, 12th Regiment is doing pretty much nothing. We've seen nothing of the Spiders for the last few days, and we're starting to get a bit stir crazy wondering if maybe they don't like us anymore. D company has an observation post outside Maddox Park which reports a good number of them likewise sitting around doing nothing. While there have been calls for us to send more detachments south or east to assist on active fronts, most of the regiment is going to be staying in place just in case the Spiders try to flank through us or make a grab at Smyrna.

I've been trying to use our quiet time for all it's worth. Toland and I have been spending more time on the firing range; he's not acceptable yet but he is getting better. I've also been darning[6] socks for myself and some of the others, while he's been cobbling shoes. Some of our people are on the verge of lameness from running around in tattered footwear.

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Sunday Afternoon, February 27th, 2011*<strong>

Ate a very nice lunch of black-eyed peas and cornbread after church, given to our company as a gift from the visiting minister and his congregation. Funny how small treats like that mean so much these days, especially when you consider how rare good food can be—I hear that one of our motorized squadrons has almost a quarter of its men out of action from food poisoning.

Sadly, while our company may not be in the midst of any fighting, we're still taking casualties. Bobby Jenson's cousin had a thermite grenade packed in his backpack (against regulations for a reason) that went off with him wearing it last night, and he was pretty badly cooked before his squadmates could get it off. It's not as bad as it could have been, and she says he'll probably recover if his burns don't get infected. Her mouth to God's ears.

We also just learned that Captain Hallock's grandson/Lieutenant Hallock's nephew was involved in an accident at the munitions plant where he works up near Rome. We know he's lost a few fingers, and it's feared that he may lose the use of his hand as well. It's a shame when things like that happen to children, and a sobering reminder of just how dangerous our world is, even outside of combat.

* * *

><p>1. "When you land on the beach and you get in there, I don't want to see anybody kneeling down and praying. If I do I'm gonna come up and boot you in the tail. You leave the praying to me and you do the fighting."<br>-Father Joe Lacy, Chaplain, United States Army

2. "This dead guy is dead. Judging by what I can see through the nice casket window, he's probably dead because he didn't duck. Say your prayers, make your peace, but always remember to duck, folks."  
>-Reverend Theo Fobius, Chaplain, Tagon's Toughs<p>

3. William Shurtleff was apparently responsible for turning the coagulated protein of ground soybeans into the Eucharist for certain branches of the environmentalist/conservationist movement. Soy is an interesting food from what little I've tasted of it, but I doubt it'll ever end world hunger.

4. Though he didn't intend it, Gibbons also convinced many people that foraging alone could allow someone to survive indefinitely in primitive conditions. I'll hopefully elaborate more on this in the afterword, but for now I'll just say... no.

5. Over 92% of all disposable diapers end up in a landfill (after being relocated there from the Wal-Mart parking lot; the remaining 8% are from Denny's). They make up 4% of solid waste in landfills. In a house with a child in diapers, disposables make up half of all household waste. On the other hand, reusable diapers do require lots of water to clean—assuming one doesn't use a high-efficiency washer, or assuming one uses a machine washer at all. And cotton tends to be a relatively dirty crop—though bamboo and hemp could make preferable substitutes. All and all, I think the hippies are right on this one. I've heard references from some oldtimers to diapers and other articles of clothing being made from old feed bags. Sounds painful, but I suppose it could be done again.

6. Traditional method of mending socks or other fabrics by weaving over the holes. Such would be a rather useful skill for anyone who intends to do lots of marching.


	14. Chapter 14: The Gathering of the Clans

or, **Burial Detail II**

* * *

><p><em>"Everything in Atlanta is self segregated according to class and race. Get used to it. ...<em>

_...Please note that things are segregated much more along class lines than racial lines._"

-Urban Dictionary entry for Atlanta

_"The analysis of tribalism in Afghanistan, and the accompanying debate on the best ways to deal with Afghan tribes, is complicated by the lack of a standard definition of "tribe." This lack of precision in social science is reflected in certain confusion in the growing body of literature on Afghanistan, much of it written by people with first hand experience. Some declare that Afghanistan's tribal system is dead, while others argue it is the only thing that matters. ..._

_...What is missing in these arguments is an appreciation of tribal structure. Pashtuns are organized according to a patrilineal segmentary lineage system. This presupposes that the tribe will segment, or split, among multiple kin groups which will be rivals with each other most of the time. When a common enemy outside the tribe poses an existential threat, the different segments tend to band together—since they are related by common descent—until the emergency is over."_

-Pashtun Tribalism and Ethnic Nationalism, Arturo G . Munoz

* * *

><p><strong>*Interlude*<br>28 February, 2011  
>Decatur, Atlanta, Georgia<br>**  
>Jean Dillon was an Ohio Native, Vietnam Veteran, owner of a landscaping company and militia officer who had fought with the 8th Regiment during their actions along McAfee Street. Wounded while on patrol, he had succumbed to acute Hemorrhagic Fever and his family in Alpharetta had requested that Jennifer Hastings be present for the memorial. Captain Hallock didn't like losing his chaplain, even if there would be a fellow Baptist filling in for her, but he had allowed her leave with three days rations, bicycle, and other needed supplies. It was a short trip, but the dangers of traveling alone and the necessity of a circuitous path across the city meant that it had taken a day and a half.<p>

She stood and listened to the old spirituals, and even sang along to We Will March Through the Valley in Peace, There Is a Balm in Gilead, and a few others that she recognized. These wailing words of bondage and anguish, salvation and deliverance had always been poignant, and seemed to be even more so in present circumstances.

Among the dead, her parishioner had been the only white man. The other seven were all black, mostly lower-income, born and raised in the local area and the characteristics of the mourned were mostly shared by the mourners. Jennifer noted that her own company was likewise predominately white. By her figuring, the two races were about evenly represented in the Georgia Militia and the various independent forces, but any given company, occasionally entire regiments, would have an 80% or greater majority in favor of one or the other. There was very little strife between the colours or creeds, however, and for that she was thankful; Atlantans may prefer to run with their own kind, but in times of trouble they'll help each other.[1]

After the service, Jennifer began speaking with a couple of attendees: Robert Williams Clifton, his fiancee Denise LeBlanc, and their little daughter. Denise was a volunteer at the field hospital in Smyrna; Robert had been a member of one of the irregular units from the desperate fighting for McAfee. The losses suffered were too great for further independent action, so he and many of his comrades had joined the Georgia Militia and would likely form the nucleus of a new Regiment: groups of close friends and family came together to form squads, groups of squads formed platoons, platoons elected officers for themselves and their companies,[2] and higher command would fit the companies into battalions or regiments, provide overarching coordination, and bring in available specialists as needed (or, more often, needed specialists as available). Robert admittedly didn't fully understand the finer details, but was generally happy with what they were doing and felt that a more rigid arrangement probably wouldn't work.

Having tired of talking military strategy, their discussion took a rather odd turn, into the realm of biology:

"Crustaceans? You mean like lobsters?" asked Jennifer.

"Yeah. They seem to resemble dendrobranchiata, but I think they're anatomy is going to have more in common with astacidea. Lot's of folks is saying that they had to be artificially created, but I think it's possible for creatures like that to have evolved naturally under the proper circumstances."

"Personally, I think they're closer to Cephalopods," said Denise, former aspiring paleontologist. "in particular, the Belemnites which didn't make it through the K-T Event and the Belosaepiidae which held on a bit longer."

"Not again with the Cephalopods. Denise, I love you dear... but you're wack!"

"I'm wack? You think we're fighting giant wall-crawling crawfish!"[3]

The conversation continued a bit longer. Jennifer had to eventually excuse herself; she had heard differing strands of Baptists argue the finer points of their beliefs, and figured that biologists were about as good at finding common ground as they. Those two were going to make a lovely couple.

* * *

><p>1. Atlanta is probably the most heavily-segregated major city in America, after Chicago. Oddly enough, it's probably a bit below-average in terms of outright racism (seems to have classism aplenty, though; how else does Neal Boortz stay on the airways?) Too busy to hate, or just too lazy?<p>

Among those who'll even admit that America is little less desegregated than it was in the 50's, the ones who write articles about it seem almost universally convinced that this is an undesirable trait which needs to be extirpated. I'll probably lose any chance of holding college tenure or public office for saying this, but I ain't sure if it is. For most of human history, our species was divided into groups of small tribes (united in shared ancestry, culture, traditions, religion, language and appearance) that usually consisted of about 150 members. The numbers may be bigger now, but the underlying nature remains, and attempts to change human nature have historically been unmitigated tragedies, as the communists have discovered. To quote G.K. Chesterton: Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

2. Speaking of tribes, I don't think it's coincidence that just about every force devoted to organized violence, for just about as long as we've had forces devoted to organized violence, have as their basic building block a group of about 150 soldiers (known to the Romans as the centuria and to us as the company). Sociologists call it Dunbar's Number: the number of personal relationships that the human brain is capable of managing. Tom Kratman says that the number for a combat force shouldn't fall below 60 (individual losses cause too much anguish for the survivors), and can seldom rise above 200; I am inclined to agree.

3. Almost a shame that it's the biologist standing for Team Crustacean and not the archeologist, otherwise there might be references to Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae of Order Eurypterida (sea scorpions).


	15. Chapter 15: Patient Killers

_"A mine is a terrible thing that waits."_  
>-Anonymous<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Tuesday Morning, March 1, 2011*<strong>

T'was nice while it lasted.

The spiders are moving a massive force down Martin Luther King Jr Drive and smaller roads therealong. They could be reinforcing their current offensive in Westview or maybe starting a new one. The number of small groups moving with the big one indicates that they might try to get behind our lines again with raiding and kidnapping teams. Our position doesn't seem to be in the path of the advance, but we have a large explosives stockpile and Colonel Berry wants us to give them as much trouble as possible.

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Wednesday Evening, March 2, 2011*<strong>

This overpass I'll be sleeping under tonight, it actually isn't the first time I've been here. I used to bring food and sleeping mats to the Bridge People[1] who camped here and in the nearby copse of trees. You'd be surprised how many hidey-holes and patches of greenery there are in an urban area, especially in the more forlorn parts.

Trying to imagine that I'm camping out in the woods back home with friends or family, but it ain't working. Still haven't forgotten that I never really liked my mom's people, and could tolerate my dad's family mostly because of the language barrier.

Anyway,

[I'm hearing explosions on MLK Dr right now. Hoping it's the enemy being blown to bits, not our people]

being a flower-grandchild, it should come as little surprise that I was pretty liberal before the war started, and I suppose I still am. Never cared for gun control, but apart from that I did a lot of ground work for various progressive, environmental and anti-war causes. Among them was the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

Do you know what I'm doing this week? I'm planting landmines.

Laid explosives before, but never "landmines" as I would define them. We always command-detonated our explosives, or at least hung around to lure the enemy into the blasts. But what we're doing now is the good old-fashioned "put a keg of ammonal in the ground, leave, and hope whatever finds it first is something you want to destroy."[2]

I could rationalize, I suppose. Could say that what I'm doing is okay because we clearly mark the mines and keep records on where and how many we placed, or I could say it doesn't really count because we're not using them against humans (but then again, my opposition to mines has always been less about who they were used against and more about who might be unintentionally harmed years or decades later). Or maybe I could just say that I'm following orders, had it not been I who had designed some of the fuses and made suggestions on placement.

Or I could give the real reason for my actions: I don't want to die.

This area is thick with spiders and robots, who seem to be getting better at flushing out our observation posts. Command-detonated explosives may be more politically acceptable, but they require someone to be hanging around close by for however long it takes the enemy to stumble upon each individual bomb. Since I was the only one in the squad to express a dislike of landmines, they would probably pick me for the job and I would probably die.

Sure, the plunger-pusher's chance of getting out alive might increase if we didn't plan on using three pickup truck beds worth of explosives. But our goal is to cause maximum damage in the shortest amount of time. You see, the present enemy force is very big and must be made smaller before it reaches the defensive lines in Westview. If it is not made smaller before it reaches Westview, a good chunk of 3rd Regiment will probably be encircled and destroyed. If that happens, they could swing north towards 12th Regiment's positions in Dixie Hills or Grove Park. If they hit Grove Park, there's a very good chance that I'll die.[3]

So, at the end of the day, I guess my best choice is going to be to do what I must to survive and just be glad that I'll be around to moralize afterwards. I still don't think I could condone the use of landmines in anything short of an existential threat.

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Friday Evening, March 4, 2011*<strong>

Back in school today. We'll have two short companies rooming with us soon, which should make things interesting. Hope I don't wind up losing my sleeping spot.

We set landmines all over Mosley Park neighborhood and thereabouts. We also got in a shootout with robots near Joseph E Boone Boulevard, but got away unscathed.

* * *

><p>1. Bridge People= Atlanta's version of the Mole People.<p>

2. There was another work of alien invasion literature that discussed the issue of landmines: Yellow Eyes, part of the Legacy of Aldenata series, by John Ringo and Tom Kratman. In that story, our Darhel "allies" demand that the Panamanians, signatories of the Ottawa Treaty, abide by its regulations so that the enemy forces may more easily conquer them. Not sure if the potential of space-faring lawyers is really the best argument against ratifying the treaty.

Chris Nuttall had another take on this in The Yeomen of England. The British and Irish Parliaments wouldn't stomach the idea of antimatter weapons being developed or employed against ground targets on their soil. As I recall, one British General had a novel solution to this obstruction: he did it anyway, begging forgiveness instead of asking permission.

3. Force multiplication would be one of few reasonable justifications for a nation to possess landmine stockpiles; they're quite useful if one wishes to increase the defensive capability of a numerically small force (or diminish the offensive capability of a numerically large one). This is one reason why Armenia, Israel, and both Koreas are unlikely to give up their stockpiles any time soon, and why Finland didn't do so until very recently. There is an apocryphal story of a Cold War-era Swedish diplomat who complained to his Finnish counterpart about their country maintaining minefields on the border with the Soviet Union, to which the Finn replied "Finland is your minefield."

* * *

><p>youtube . com (slash) watch?v=pXVCYQ1qix8<p> 


	16. Chapter 16: There Ain't No Ash Will Burn

_"I live back in the woods, you see/ big city problems never bothered me."_  
>-Hank Williams II<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*Interlude*<br>26 November, 2010  
>Fairmount, Georgia, USA<strong>

"I'm sorry gentlemen," said the store owner. "Ten items or less per person on all food purchases."

"Oh come on, Ching-Chong. I know your people don't do Thanksgiving but even you know what Black Friday is. Besides, I have a special permit!"

The man's coat flew open to reveal a sawed-off shotgun. His five accomplices likewise produced weaponry, getting the drop on the guard and a third employee. Daniel Liu immediately threw his hands in the air.

These six robbers weren't the finest specimens of Gordon County Genius. Had they been brighter, they might have been quicker to get Mr Liu away from the counter, lest something be hidden behind the overhead. Had they been more observant, they might have not stood directly in front of the counter, lest something bad come out at them from those four little holes on the bottom...

* * *

><p>"...um, say that to me again, Bueller. He killed five men... with a flamethrower?"<p>

"No sir, Sheriff Ralston. He blinded them with a flamethrower, then he and the others shot 'em. Kinda of cool, ain't it?"

There was an audible pause over the radio, as Ralston lamented the fact that some of his deputies weren't the finest specimens of Gordon County Genius either.

Technically it wasn't a flamethrower at all, but the modified burners and flame relays from incinerators normally found on pig and chicken farms. The Lius had been worried by the phenomenon of Flash Mob Robberies and settled on this as a workable deterrent. It would have probably gotten them in trouble once, but nowadays they'll likely be commended for snuffing out a few more useless eaters.[1]

* * *

><p><strong>29 December, 2010<br>Fairmount, Georgia, USA**

Sam "Sonny" Stack's watch was just about to end. He pulled his jacket tighter as he rocked back in forth in the lawn chair, trying to produce more heat. The Texaco's roof would have been a great place to watch the fireworks on New Year's Eve, but it didn't seem like there would be any this time.

It was dark. The narrow crescent moon didn't give any real light, the power grid was a distant memory, and anyone who still had fuel for their generators was using it sparingly. Then again, Fairmount had always been a dreary little place after dark, such was the fate of small towns bypassed by big highways.[2]

"You still awake, Sonny?" called a voice from below.

"Yup. Be careful coming up, those rungs are slippery."

"How's my hobo stove holding up for you?"

"Nice while it lasted, Brad. Would be working better if I wasn't out of wood chips."

"Ick. Yeah, gotta be kind of conservative with those."

Sonny grabbed his bag and rifle and made his way down. As he walked by the storefront, he cast a glance through the ill-fitted glass to see Daniel Liu's wife and kids closing up shop for the night. The neighborhood had really put a lot of work into helping clean up; to look at it, you would think they'd merely suffered a recent stove explosion.

"You heading back to the Cowboy Church?" asked Samuel Liu.

"Yeah, how about you?"

"Got some more feed for them, I can take you there if you want. My Prius doesn't burn the gas like that old truck of yours; you should get one."

"My truck doesn't need a computer programmer to fix it. But since you offered, I'll leave it here for the night.. You're dropping your brother and sister off for riding lessons tomorrow morning, ain't you?"

Sam nodded.

"Alright. Hey, how's your dad anyway?"

"He's up and moving— he's better. Better than the one robber who survived at least."

* * *

><p><strong>1 January, 2011<br>Outside Calhoun, Georgia, USA**

"DIE!"

Sonny let off a burst and dropped behind the rock wall. One of the other armed civilians was not so quick and took several rounds mid-torso. That wasn't working very well on the enemy.

"Aim for the head, y'all!" he called.

"Hey Sonny, we need more gun!" yelled Brad, fighting through the shakes to reload his .300 WSM.

"We're doing fine against the crabs but nothing we have can hurt those walkers!" yelled another soldier

"We wouldn't have any more cannons, would we?" asked one of the kids from Cowboy Church, a little girl with a predilection for large explosions.

It had been very funny watching those Civil War reenactors blow away that chicken walker, just as it had been funny watching World War II reenactors blasting manta rays with their 88's. Quite a shame that both had been plastered in short order.

A rocket came in on the wall, killing or wounding half of the humans. The crabs had moved off the road when the shooting started, probably intent on flanking them, and staying in place was clearly hopeless.

"Brad, fall back with the others! I'll take a squad through the canebrakes and hit them in the back; I doubt they can get through them, maybe they don't know that we can." Brad nodded an affirmative and moved, but not quite as quickly as desired.

The five remaining walkers sought to run down fleeing humans. There was sudden a roar from behind the roadside foliage as two bulldozers tore through it to pounce upon them. Three walkers were crushed undertread and a crab was killed by a co-driver's shotgun, but bullets and plasma beams from the survivors put a quick end to this surreal rampage. Nonetheless, that unexpected distraction allowed Sonny and the others to get into a position where they could engage the crabs without the walkers cutting them down.

Sonny watched as another shotgun blast took off one of their heads. Memo to self: trade in the AR15 for a shotgun: 12-gauge or bigger,[3] with slugs. Three more crabs went down before they and the walkers decided the humans weren't worth it and started falling back. The drone of multiple manta rays said they were all about to get some area-effect stinging, so Sonny thought it best to hoof it.

* * *

><p><strong>2 January, 2011<br>Calhoun, Georgia, USA**

The squad of police and posse moved as discreetly as they could around the edges of the fallow field. There had been no signs of alien raiders since mid-afternoon yesterday, but no chances were taken. The trailer park was just ahead, but they could make out no activity in the pre-morning darkness, nor could they hear anything above the howling wind.

Sheriff Ralston climbed up into the first trailer, which had been knocked off its foundation and looked a bit like it had been smacked by a freight train. No one inside, but burn marks, bullet-holes and blood splatter said that nothing good had come to those who once lived here.

He heard a noise coming from an old car in the yard. Hitting the mag-light one his M4 Carbine, he spun to see a young boy emerging from the trunk, probably for the first time since the fighting began.

"Are you here to get them, mister policeman?"

"What's that, son? Who do you want me get?"

"My mom and dad and sister. The monsters hurt mom and dad and took sister with them. Can you bring them back?"

* * *

><p><strong>4 January, 2011<br>Fairmount, Georgia**

Sonny dropped Brad and one of the others off at the Texaco for their guard shifts. His old Chevy C/K really burned the gas, but it was one of the few trucks still running these days. This would probably be their last week on duty; the Liu's were closing up due to lack of merchandise and free food rations were going to be distributed at the fire station instead. After Calhoun, everyone lived in terror of further attacks by the alien invaders, and if there had ever been reluctance by the Sheriff's Office to make use of civilian volunteers, it was long gone.

"Do you think they knew about that massive FEMA camp near Calhoun?" asked Brad.

"Uh, I dunno." replied Sonny.

"Well, it was one of the first things they went after when they landed. Did a pretty good job of it too; there was four thousand people in there and almost no one over the age of 12 got out alive."

"Odd that they left the kids."

"Only wanting to kill potential soldiers? Leaving dead weight for the survivors? Waiting for them to reach a harness-able age?"

"Maybe. How many do you think died?"

"For the county? No idea. Our group had fifty dead and about as many wounded, that against twelve of the things. Extrapolate for the whole city and that's… what, three hundred dead in combat? Ten times that number killed by manta rays and the orbital strike on the armory. Add in the refugees, and, well…"

Sonny looked down, prodding with his foot at one of the rubbish piles that were becoming more and more common around town. Calhoun had been a small raid; no more than forty crabs and walkers each. Fairmount hadn't seen a single alien lifeform and the threads of society were already unraveling here. They were used to momentary disruptions from winter storms and tornadoes, and some had even squirreled away extra food and ammunition in case worse things ever happened. That was better than nothing, but it wasn't going to be enough for those who wanted to make it till the next new year.

* * *

><p><strong>3 March, 2011<br>Alpharetta, Georgia**

Four hundred riders and their mounts made their way through a residential subdivision, inhabited now by feral dogs and semi-feral people. If civilized living was hard in the country and harder in the non-occupied cities, it was nigh impossible in between.

Brad wouldn't be making it to the Battle of Atlanta; he had been injured in training, and his genius had always been more technical than military anyway. The various equestrian organizations in Gordon County had pooled their resources to provide two cavalry squadrons for operations in the area, and Sonny was second-in-command for one such squadron. They would meet up with Major Langdon today, and within the week would be seeing action in the north of the city.

* * *

><p>1. Would something like that actually work? At grievous risks to user, bystanders, and the property supposedly being protected: quite possibly. A South African security company makes devises for personal automobiles that shoots a jet of flame at would-be carjackers. There's probably more practical means of defending one's store (tear gas?), but this is definitely the most cinematic. Think of it as an homage to the robbery scene in Lethal Weapon 1.<p>

2. Pick your poison, rural America. It seems as though the alternative to becoming Fairmont is becoming Jasper, where instead of poor locals being driven from their homes by inability to find work, poor locals are being driven from their homes by inability to handle the new tax burden (though nowadays neither can do either).

3. "Bigger than a 12 gauge? Is that even possible?" I've been asked. Ohhh yes.

If you've ever seen Tremors you might remember Burt the Survivalist's elephant gun. That was actually an EIGHT-gauge (.835 caliber!) William Moore and Company shotgun. By my calculations, something that large would be relatively effective even against mechs. Even bigger exist, but I'd hate to march around with a combat load for one.


	17. Chapter 17: Consultation

_"The sewer, in old Paris, is the rendezvous of all drainages and all assays. Political economy sees in it a detritus, social philosophy sees in it a residuum._

_All that paints besmears. The last veil is rent. A sewer is a cynic. It tells all."_

-Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Saturday Afternoon, March 5, 2011*<strong>

Here I sit, waiting for a ride home in the massive tent city that used to be Smyrna. It's raining.

My discussion with the colonel went well. I gave him some of the books I'd found, as well as a few memos I wrote during my free time, and suggested a few other methods of scavenging food.

(Incidentally, they've gotten wise to us mouseholing our way through the walls of stores, and are becoming more thorough in booby trapping them. Berry says stay out, stay alive.)

Something I'm worried about right now is sewage. The spiders seem to have a pretty good Graves Registration Service going, but Watershed Management under their rule has reached nearly Campbell-level ineptitude,[1] and you start to really notice on the warmer days. You can see sinkholes forming all over the place, and a lot of those are going to turn into cesspools real soon. Colonel Berry says it's a problem he's been worried about for awhile, but there's not much we can do about it. I hope we can do something about it, preferably before our men and animals start dropping from West Nile Virus.

We now have a telegraph line set up between Smyrna HQ and G Company. That should help me stay in touch with the colonel, even during the busier times when face-to-face meetings are impractical.

In other news: the spider forces that we had been sent out against are making their move against defenders in Westview. They've been given a fighting chance (emphasis on fighting), though, thanks in part to our company's earlier intercessions. Someone was apparently impressed with our performance in the west, and wants to see if we can do the same in the north.

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Monday Morning, March 7, 2011*<strong>

Ate a very good breakfast today. Can't remember what it was, and I'm not sure if I knew what it was even while I was eating it, but it was good.

Saw an interesting sight while I was on patrol yesterday: a pack… dog. Apparently one of the other companies uses them to haul ammo for their machinegunners.[2] It makes sense, and sometimes I wish that I had a beast of burden to haul my M-14 for me, but I would be very upset if I found myself in the middle of a gunfight and my ammo carrier went chasing after a stray cat. I think I'll be sticking with my bicycle as a pack burro (or get an actual burro, one of our platoons really does use a few).

They seem to be happy with my work alongside Recruit Toland and others, and want to see if I can handle subordinates in the field, so I've been promoted to corporal. Skitter says I may soon get a brevet rank of sergeant and put in command of 4th Platoon's Charlie Squad if their commander is still incapacitated by the middle of the month. God I hope he gets better, because leadership is not something I've ever enjoyed.

Sergeant Skitter is an interesting fellow, by the way, or at least I think so. I'd write up a full bio on him if time allowed, and if any attempt to talk about his past didn't bring more questions than answers. Bishop is his real last name, no idea what his first is. I think he said he was from Roswell, but his family traveled all up and down the eastern seaboard and he apparently has cousins and inlaws stretched out from Miami to Boston. Mentioned that he had an ex-wife and some kids in Kansas, but doesn't expect to see them again. Rather callous like that in his dealings with others, but in this world it's almost an advantage.[3]

Bit of an ego about him too, and sometimes I think he takes a little too much enjoyment from the killing of sentient beings. However, what I can't critique is his leadership or organizational skills. He came into the militia under the promise that he could "have fun and kill spiders", bringing about a dozen "business associates" with him from certain ventures he'd been involved in (never will specify just what those ventures were, but "freelance pharmacy" is one term I've heard used to describe them).

He created his own platoon pretty much from scratch, and sometimes I think that he has his eyes on even bigger things in the future. The Hallocks seem to think so too, and they try to keep a close eye on him. He's been busy lately running his little gang of berserkers, as well as dealing with all the camp followers, so maybe he'll stay out of trouble for now.

Captain Hallock is detaching my squad to B Company for a long-range patrol out into the Collier Hills area. This is going to be more reconnaissance than interdiction, unlike the recent actions in Mosley Park, though we've been told not to pass up the opportunity to cause mayhem behind enemy lines.

During the Civil War, that area saw some of the worst fighting in the overall Battle of Atlanta, but it doesn't seem to have had much conflict this time. Hope it stays peaceful for us.

* * *

><p>1. Atlanta has long had problems with its decaying sewer and water infrastructure being unable to deal with the explosive growth of the city. Former Atlanta mayor and later Florida prison inmate Bill Campbell infamously allowed raw sewage to be dumped into the city's creeks and rivers because paying the fines was cheaper than repairing the aged pipes. In 1993, a ruptured water pipe underneath a Midtown hotel parking lot created a 35-foot deep crater, killing two people. The size of the thing has to be seen to be believed.<p>

Attempts have been made to rectify the situation, but it comes at a price: Atlantans pay about twice as much for sewage and water as New Yorkers.

2. Dogs actually have been used in such a role before and might arguably do a better job than burros, being generally easier to care for in an urban environment.

3. Take one guess as to who Sergeant Skitter is based off of/related to.


	18. Chapter 18: Family Reunion

_Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time."_  
>-Fyodor Dostoyevsky<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*interlude*<br>3 January, 2011  
>North of Fort McPherson, West Atlanta, Georgia, USA<strong>

"Hurry up, Helen! Ride or die, fool! Ride or die!"

"You're one to talk, Madea. You should have left the city with Charles and me when these things first showed up! If it weren't for you I'd be all the way to Conyers by now!"[1]

Helen came running to the living room with the last of the suitcases. The two women began moving them to a 1970 Cadillac DeVille parked haphazardly in the yard, aided by a sky glowing hotly with the blues of orbital bombings and oranges of urban firestorms. The crazed residents of Oakland were running in the streets littered with dead cars and various bits of detritus. It was a scene of complete pandemonium; Atlanta was burning again.

"Conyers? Can we just go around Conyers?" "No." "They don't like me none over there, you wanna know what happened last time I went to Conyers?" "No" "I spent a day in a Rockdale County Quiktrip and a night in the Dekalb County jail! Judges got a real attitude with me, they took me to the judge and he said 'I'm sick of seeing you', I said 'I'm sick of seeing you too.' He said 'Don't be getting smart with me', I said…"

Helen Simmons-Blake really didn't care what Mabel "Madea" Simmons had said to that judge, not with God-only-knows-what on the march towards them. Even now they could hear the sound of their "trumpets" and scattered gunfire which grew fainter with every pass by the alien aircraft.

The old Caddie jumped off Lee Street and bounded the railroad tracks dividing it and Murphy Avenue. They tore through parking lots, vacant fields and back alleys when the actual road was impassable, and made the road passable where detours were lacking. To say that Madea was an old hand at aggressive driving would be quite the understatement (she hadn't held a valid driver's license since Jimmy Carter held office… as governor), and for all the complaining she had done about being forced to drive the "rustbucket lemon", her Detroit Dinosaur seemed to perform a fine service as a bulldozer.

By the time they hit Flat Shoals Road, she was dragging one of the alien monsters along by the undercarriage. Out of the City of Desolation, into the Howling Wilderness.

* * *

><p><strong><strong>5 March, 2011<strong>  
>Westview, Atlanta, Georgia<strong>

Captain Robert Williams Clifton of A Company, 9th Regiment, temporarily detached to 3rd, took a position behind an overturned Doritos truck (long ago picked clean of its contents). The rest of his force was mostly positioned in the rubble of a collapsed overpass in front of him, from which they sought to employ a reverse-slope defense against oncoming warrior forces.

"Here they come, boys and girls!" he said. "Stay low and in cover— keep out of the streets."

"Boy, I'll j-walk all up and down their streets, just watch 'em mess with me…" murmured First Lieutenant Mabel Simmons.

The footsteps of the drones grew louder, with the pavement literally quaking from their weight. It was an unnerving feeling, no matter how many times you went up against them.

"Go!"

* * *

><p>Madea walked down the street muttering darkly, as was her nature, and seemingly oblivious to the fact that the area was still being fought over. Having emptied the magazine of her AKM, she produced a Smith and Wesson SD9 and fired four shots into the face of a charging warrior. Another one followed behind it and she attempted to fire, only to have the weapon jam. Discarding her pistol, she took the rifle in both hands and met the last attacker, bayonet first.<p>

"Good thing you only had one of them left to stab." said one of the soldiers, a member of her extended family, during a lull in the fighting.

"Heh, yeah. Ditch the Smith and Wessons, auntie; you'll live longer."[2]

"Mind your own business, fool; you'll live longer."

A volley of plasma bolts flew overhead, spraying super-heated shrapnel like a hive of angry hornets. The soldiers threw themselves themselves to the ground as the .50's and bigger opened up in response.

"Company, fall back!" yelled captain Clifton. "We hit them again as they cross the parking lots before the Hamilton E Holmes MARTA station."

Nightfall came and the Simmons Family found themselves half a mile back from where they had started. Casualties had been surprisingly light that day, with two of theirs dead and three more seriously wounded out of some sixty to eighty actively fighting in the area. They had inflicted serious casualties on the enemy, and while Westview was almost certainly lost, it could be reasonably hoped that the next neighbourhood would fall even harder.

"So, most everyone in this company is your family and friends?" asked Clifton later that night.

"Well, that's what was when we started, by blood or marriage. Lots of strangers running round nowadays that I dunno who is." replied Madea, her voice betraying a tinge of sorrow for the many they had lost, and fear for inevitable losses to come.

"Militia High Command said we should try and pick out 'kinsmen' for officers and NCO's. Keep it in the family as much as we can, you know what I'm saying?"

"You know, when I first heard the Georgia Militia is sending us an officer's cadre, I think they sending us the Dukes of Hazard or something. So it could always be worse."

Clifton was a bit amused by that one; a Duke he was not, but he always did have a thing for Dodge Chargers. Simmons was undoubtedly insane, but she was as good an Executive Officer as you could ask, and as a person she had a grandmotherly charm that he found quite endearing. Had such a matriarch existed in his own family, it might have kept him out of the gangs. She was the kind who could inspire a healthy sense of fear in an ill-tempered youngster, and soon the aliens would learn to fear her too.

* * *

><p>1. Tyler Perry's Madea, from the so-named series of films and plays. My editorsniece and nephew insisted that I couldn't have my story take place in Atlanta without paying homage to it, and they are quite correct. Frankly, one could consider this chapter to be their work as much as mine. We're working from the plays moreso than the movies; Helen McCarter ultimately stayed with her husband in the stage version of Diary of Mad Black Woman.

2. I really have nothing against autoloading pistols in and of themselves—I seldom use them, but that's just a matter of what's practical for me personally. But Smith and Wesson's autoloaders left a rather bad taste in my mouth that no amount of remarketing or rebranding is ever likely to get rid of.

Of course, there's no time for gun-nut snobbery when SHTF. Fact of the matter is, when you get right down to it, even a really, really crappy gun is more likely than not going to do just fine at letting you express your dislike of something from a relatively safe distance.


	19. Chapter 19: Guns and Such

_"The United States started to go downhill when its military changed from a round designed to kill the enemies of America to one designed to piss them off."_  
>-John Ringo<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Tuesday morning, March 8, 2011*<strong>

Collier Hills and thereabouts is this weird mishmash of ritzy and ghetto, and going from one to the other is often a matter of crossing the street.[1] I saw several high-dollar constructions that looked like they started falling apart shortly after they were built (somehow, you can almost always tell the difference between neighborhoods that started rotting only after the skies fell, and those that never were the kind of place to raise your kids), and I generally get the feeling that this area was the site of several successive gentrification attempts that never really took.

But it's got some things going for it. Not a sign of robots or spiders on this side of Peachtree Creek, and surprisingly good pickings for the competent scavenger. We did find a pretty large group of unaffiliated humans camped out on a golf course to the north of here. Couldn't recruit any of them, but we passed out literature anyways. They seem to be getting hungry, and we may see a few join up since the militia still does pretty good feeding its members. That alone has done well at keeping our numbers up, even with attrition rates that most pre-apocalypse armies would consider unacceptable.[2]

We're heading further north tonight. Got word of some pretty scattered, pretty disorganized enemy forces mulling about in a wide area up there. We plan on hitting them while they're still in that condition. Gonna be carpooling with a small motorized troop, which is always fun.

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Thursday afternoon, March 10, 2011*<strong>

We've done well the last couple of days, but there have been losses. Five humans dead so far, including three from our regiment. One of the men in my fireteam took a round through the upper spine early this morning. He passed shortly after sunrise. Brian McIrvin was the name. Just shy of 17, came to us from either Whitfield or White County (most of the company does) and hadn't been here more than a week. New arrivals tend to be the worst to die, but Brian died through no fault of his own. He was a good soldier, it was a real shame to lose him. One truck was also lost along with its heavy machine gun. No idea how many spiders we killed, but I would guess about twelve, plus six robots. I personally could put two notches on my M-14, if I didn't find that practice somewhat detestable. Speaking of which...

United States Rifle, 7.62 mm, M14. America's last battle rifle. It was designed in the fifties and has much in common with the thirties era M-1 Garand that it replaced. Though production ended in 1964 and it was officially phased out in 1967, it soldiered on in niche roles and had seen quite a revival in the various Bush Wars (no pun intended) of the late 20th/early 21st century, with solders nostalgic for its superior range, knockdown power, and reliability over the M-16.[3]

I'm still not entirely sure where the nice camo wearing, rightwing antigovernment types I've been hanging with for the last few months got their impressive stash of military pattern, fully automatic semivintage weaponry. I don't know if the various law enforcement agencies who requested their assistance ever asked, but I bet they wondered. I'm thinking they were just glad to have them.

The militiamen seem glad to have them too. I've often been told how lucky I am to be carrying a Real Gun instead of some wimpy Mattel toy with its glorified .22 bullets. While I most certainly agree that 5.56mm NATO in general is only marginally suitable for spiders, and Armalite-pattern weapons in particular are too finicky for partisans, there is a shortcoming with the M-14 that I think my comrades are overlooking. It's easy to do when you're a big, tough Georgia hillbilly.

But when you're a five foot tall, one hundred pound, nineteen year old college student, it can be very hard to carry around a gun that is more than a tenth of your weight and over three quarters of your height. I'll often end a day of fighting convinced that my back and shoulder are shattered from the punishment they've taken. It's hard enough for me to manage, and I imagine it would be impossible for someone my size with less firearms experience. Even the Daniel Boones and John Rambos amongst us won't dare fire the things on full auto without the help of a bipod (and the M-14 makes a very poor squad automatic weapon).[4]

We're camping out today just a stone's throw from the Governor's mansion, on the grounds of an even bigger mansion with a stark facade of Portland Brownstone. A very foreboding building, reminding me of country manors back up in New England, of an overall style that really doesn't fit into its environment. Even the countertops are all furnished with Carrara marble from Tuscany, not Creole Marble from Tate.[5]

Whoever the owner was, he clearly liked things bigger and… bigger. Though thoroughly ransacked, the whole place still testified to the opulence and waste for which the Southern New Money are so well known. The Old Money types were terrible in their own way, but at least they had some sense of self-control. I have to wonder if that's what did in the owner: beyond the battered-down steel fence, around the burned-out red and yellow hummer, through a blood soaked vestibule and into a foyer that shows heavy signs of human-on-human combat, we generally get the feeling that he did not get out of the city peaceably. Conspicuous consumption is never good for security.

Most of the basement has caved in and there was nothing worthwhile left in the more obvious portions (not even in what I assume to have been a vault or panic room of some kind, which had clearly been the loser in a battle between itself and some questionably-placed explosives). However, one of Sergeant Skitter's people is apparently an old hand at hide and seek, and he informed us that people often leave fun things under the concrete slabs of their garages. We checked the garage in greater detail, and found an entryway to quite the treasure shelter. There's dozens of guns down there, exotic collector arms mostly. Things that make my M-14 look like a toy: there's various assault rifles in mutated forms, elephant guns, and at least two anti-material rifles like the Barrett gun, only bigger. There's even two cases of rocket and grenade launchers (a modernized version of the old M72 LAW and the never-got-off-the-ground prototype XM25, respectively). This guy had connections.

In addition to the guns, there's lots of bullets, reloading supplies and spare parts. Room and bedding for four, but very little medicine, seed, food or water. I don't know if he planned on having his family eat gunpowder after the sky fell or what…[6]

* * *

><p>1. This seems to be very common in large Southern cities. I don't know if the dividing line is quite so stark elsewhere, though I've heard that it once was in New York City (a trip back to 1988 and one wrong turn sends you from World-Class City straight into the Twilight Zone).<p>

2. For anyone waging war in the aftermath of societal collapse, procuring and securing foodstuffs would be about as important as weapons and ammunition. Not only would you be ensuring the survival of your own people, you would be denying resources from potential enemies, and giving yourself the ability to trade or share with potential friends.

3. Same happened with the Russians when they went to Afghanistan. While they actually liked the overall design of their new AK74s, they felt that its bullet was underpowered for the ranges they were dealing with and many soldiers unofficially reverted back to AKMs and AK47s.

4. Standard-issue M14s often had the selector-switch locked to disallow automatic fire. One variant, the M14E2, known later as the M14A1, maintained the selector switch, was weighted to be heavier, used a straight stock, and included an integral bipod. It was intended to replace the BAR as a squad automatic weapon, but that role was eventually filled by the M60. This variant doesn't seem to have been a widely built or issued weapon, and like the original, users often complained that it was too heavy to be a standard arm and too light to be an automatic rifle. The Marines didn't seem to like either weapon, and many held on to their BARs for as long as possible.

The M16 has its flaws, namely that it's a carbine pretending to be a rifle, but one clear advantage of the system is that a even a child can comfortably and accurately fire one for as long as it takes to jam. If you're worried about doomsday and your plans involve fighting off the marauding bandits with your Mighty Thunder Stick, you might also consider something more manageable for the wife and kids, just in case Doomsday +1 sees you bedridden from dysentery. If you don't want to pay the gun-nut premium for an Evil Black Rifle, a .30-30 or similar is a fine manstopper and only a bit harsher in terms of felt recoil.

5. Georgia is not often associated with marble, but there is a surprisingly rich deposit of it in the northern foothills of Pickens and Gilmer County, mostly near the town of Tate. More than half of the marble monuments in Washington DC come from those mines and quarries, and the contents of the veins are valued by sculptors and artisans the world over.

6. This seems to be another common oversight among survivalists, which I plan on addressing more fully later. So you've got yourself a nice stockpile of firearms? Nothing wrong with that, lots of things good with it, but how are you going to stay healthy enough to use them?

Hunting? Everyone's going to be hunting. As I tried to demonstrate in Chapter 12, even a 90% dieoff would still leave more hungry mouths than whitetail.

Using your gun to take what you need? Bad idea, as I more blatantly demonstrated in Chapter 16.


	20. Chapter 20: Health Care

_"Certainly there was nothing romantic about nursing. To her, it meant groans, delirium, death and smells. The hospitals were filled with dirty, bewhiskered, verminous men who smelled terribly and bore on their bodies wounds hideous enough to turn a Christian's stomach. The hospitals stank of gangrene, the odor assaulting her nostrils long before the doors were reached, a sickish sweet smell that clung to her hands and hair and haunted her in her dreams."_  
>-Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*interlude*<br>10 March, 2011  
>North Cobb County Commissary, Acworth, Georgia, USA<strong>

"I hated carburetors before electronic fuel injection, and I hate carburetors now" said the old man as he continued fiddling under the hood of the 1963 Ford Galaxie. "Try it again."

Private Denise Clifton (née Leblanc) turned the key, to no effect. The two traded places and continued trying to coax the thing to life. She did not like the idea of having to walk back to Smyrna with their fresh supplies, any more than their suppliers liked the idea of helping haul it.

"Hey Dad, we've got two hundred pounds of medical supplies and Cap wants us moving in ten minutes, whether y'all can get that car started or not. Trunk or backpacks?"

"Trunk, I'll get it going..." said her dad.

"Backpacks." countered Denise.

One more try and the engine was running. Charlene Matlock shrugged and ordered her stretcher bearers to start loading the car up, and the medical team was soon heading south.

"Don't worry Denise, stick with me and we'll make a mechanic out of you." said Ben Matlock as they rolled down Old Highway 41.

"My dad was a mechanic, but I think I'll stick with organic machinery; less chance of leaving bits of skin behind on a hot engine component." Denise cringed as she spoke, as if recalling a memory she'd rather forget.

"Shucks, doesn't do any good thinking like that, you'll never try anything new."

"Where did you learn to fix cars anyway, Ben? Law school?"

"Hah! Police academy, of all things. The Sheriff's office I used to work for in my home town had three cars just like this one—three cars and two deputies. Back then, that was all that most of the smaller towns needed. Yep, those were the days."

"Sounds like a cushy job. What caused you to give it up?"

"Hit by a car while directing traffic. My lawman days were over, and I always wanted to see if I could handle bigger things, so I traded small-town North Carolina for the big city. You know, I experienced some weird things during and after my practice, but I never counted on space aliens coming to ruin my retirement!"[1]

"I don't think anyone counted on that."

They continued talking as they traveled. The discussion was mostly on the topic of family, but also drifted into the issues of personal health problems: namely his bad back and her chronic earaches. Treatment was now available for both, in the form of a natural remedy that would have once been quite illegal.

* * *

><p><strong>1st Divisional Hospital, 5th Brigade<br>Smyrna, Georgia, USA  
><strong>

Smyrna seemed to have as many people in cots as on foot at times. Emory University and the Adventist Healthcare System co-owned a facility there, and much of the staff from the Center for Disease Control and Grady Memorial Hospital had found their way into the area. Still, with them handling most of the serious casualties in Northwest Metro Atlanta, it was little surprise that they were generally overwhelmed.

Matlock and Denise worked at a large makeshift hospital on the grounds of the Campbell High School, which also occupied the buildings and parking lots of a nearby shopping strip. They mostly found themselves working together in the ward for exotic, uncommon and unidentified ailments.[2] This was where most of the hospital's untrained and undertrained orderlies went—it was bordered by the trauma ward, recovery ward and palliative ward, all of which often called upon them in times of major outbreaks or battles.

"We heard back from Dr Loon this afternoon" said Denise, as they went through the day's paperwork. "The Liman family tested positive for botulism, still not sure what's wrong with Sergeant Burke, but he suspects anthrax."

"Bad mutton?" asked Ben.

"Good chance of it. If so, he probably won't be the last case we see. Better send an advisory to his company."

"And what else have we had this week?"

"Let's see... halfway through the week and we have a case of Dengue Fever, more of what we suspect to be Hantavirus... why are they still calling that one an uncommon disease?"

"Because there's so little they can do about it."[3]

"...and six cases of Hanson's Disease..."

"Hanson's disease?...leprosy! Yikes! How did that happen?" asked Matlock.

Denise scratched her head pensively. "The patients were refugees from south side... south side is fed by South Georgia... South Georgia... armadillos?"

"Armadillos cause leprosy?"

"They can, when improperly cooked or handled. Sometimes, I think food-borne illnesses are killing more people than water-borne ones."

It was almost surreal, thinking that Americans in the 21st century were getting sick from bugs that once plagued the Biblical Patriarchs, but such could be expected in a world where treatment options had often regressed by some fifty years. Even more worrying was the newer illnesses: MRSA and Hepatitis C were still the terrors of healthcare workers, and there had been cases of pneumonia and tuberculosis showing resistance to normal antibiotics.[4]

"There doesn't seem to have been any cases of typhoid lately." said Ben. "For that matter, it's been a good two weeks since the last case of Typhus. I think we may be out of the woods on those counts."

"Cholera season is about to start." noted Denise. "As for typhus, different strands tend to come and go seasonally. Epidemic typhus historically hit hardest in winter when people are wearing more clothing and bathing less often, but there'll be other types to give us grief once things start heating up, sanitary situation remaining what it is. Out of the woods, we are not."

"Well, maybe the sanitary situation will get better."

"The sanitary situation will not get better, Ben."

"It might."

"No."

Denise buried herself further into the paperwork. Usually she appreciated Ben's optimism in contrast to her own gloominess, but she could only take so much.

* * *

><p>1. This, of course, is Matlock from the titular series. As a child, many of my summer vacations were spent at Grandma's house, where every evening my siblings and I watched Matlock and Diagnoses Murder after a day's work in the garden (we never complained; we liked fried squash and okra). Having heard of Andy Griffith's recent passing, my homage now becomes a memorial.<p>

This actually opens up quite the can of worms for my fanfic. In one episode, Matlock was asked to solve a murder by the ghost of the victim. So by entwining the worlds of Falling Skies and Matlock, I now have a universe where aliens and ghosts are known to exist (Do alien ghosts exist?).

Not only that, Matlock unsurprisingly once came to the aid of Dr. Sloan from Diagnoses Murder. Dr. Sloan surprisingly once had a run-in with the Greene Family from Promised Land. Promised Land is a spin-off of Touched by an Angel. Is it possible that the skitters may eventually be visited by Agents of God Almighty? (Who's side will they take?)

UPDATE: When I first saw the Volm, that's exactly what I thought was happening.

2. I would expect a medical unit to normally put a high priority on patients with idiopathic symptoms (or maybe not; I really know next to nothing about hospital procedure). But in a world with few diagnosticians, it seems very likely that trained healthcare workers would focus on what they know how to treat, and leave the more enigmatic cases in the hands of the glorified candy stripers. This presumes they've been given a decent course on asepsis first. Be kind of bad if Dr. Buffer is eating his burger in the same room as a patient who happens to have Ebola.

3. aka Hemorrhagic Fever with Renal Syndrome, which I've already mentioned before. Infamous for infecting some three thousand UN personnel during the Korean War with a 5-10% mortality rate (incidentally, it is very hard to find information on disease-related sickness and deaths for servicemen during that war; I have a sneaking suspicion that our government doesn't want to be completely forthcoming on the fact that their soldiers were still dying of camp fever in the 1950's). Mortality rates for some variants can go up to 35%.

4. MRSA and Hepatitis C are dangerous enough even for those trained in not contracting them, and if antimicrobial-resistant pathogens are scary while antimicrobials are plentiful, imagine what it'll be like when they are not.

Of course, I don't wish to suggest that medical practices will immediately revert to medieval or even paleolithic standards, as some survivalists do. The medical knowledge of the last few centuries wouldn't disappear overnight and I think it's very unlikely for things reach an equilibrium worse than early 20th century standards (so average life expectancy of fifty and a ten percent infant mortality rate—still a hard pill to swallow, but some of my family remember worse and their childhoods don't seem to have been miserable).


	21. Chapter 21: Infiltrators

_We 'eld our bloomin' own, the papers say,  
>But man for man the Fuzzy knocked us 'oller.<br>Then 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an' the missis and the kid;  
>Our orders was to break you, an' of course we went an' did.<br>We sloshed you with Martinis, an' it wasn't 'ardly fair;  
>But for all the odds agin' you, Fuzzy-Wuz, you broke the square.<em>[1]  
>-Fuzzy-Wuzzy, by Rudyard Kipling<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Friday morning, March 11, 2011*<strong>

Met up with a courier from the company on our way back to Grove Park Elementary. Local news has always been depressing, but its somehow even worse now that that we don't have Monica Pearson[2] to, in the words of a former roommate, tell us about who died in Atlanta today or what new initiative Georgia Tech is implementing to annoy and spy on their students (ie protect us from the scary black people who sometimes get lost and stray into Midtown).

Westview and Florida Heights has fallen, Harland Terrace and Charlet Woods will fall, and defensive lines in surrounding neighborhoods are in complete disarray. Their problems seem to be rippling throughout the rest of the western half of the city, with so many units (ours included) expending resources and making gestures such as our recent couple of raids to try and keep the line from collapsing. If the spiders press their advantage and hit us now we'd be in an awful lot of trouble, but it seems they're doing something even more worrisome.

Small forces of spiders and robots are breaking through our defenses and secreting themselves in the rear: stealing children, raiding HQs, harassing convoys and generally being a pain in the, um, rear. If we have to pull proactive militia units off the line to help the reactive ones defend themselves we'll see our overall capabilities suffer tremendously. Keeping their ground forces contained within the Perimeter may well be impossible.

Clever move on their part, going back to marauding. Our enemy has often shown a surprising level of strategic ineptitude, but that seems to be changing. Seems that killing half of them only makes the remainder twice as smart. They're getting sneaky, and we don't like sneaky aliens.

And what now shall we do? The Hallocks are hoping the Regiment leaves G Company in place and diverts more footloose forces to go play whack-a-spider along the Perimeter, but really who knows what'll happen? The pressure seems to be mounting in Dixie Hills, but there's still been very little activity north of Joseph E Boone Boulevard.

They have said that we should get used to the little raids we've been running, and keep ourselves ready for a possible redeployment on short notice. High command wants to throw some more jabs at the enemy, try and keep them off their footing while we regain ours. If that tactic fails, they seem to argue, then at least we'll all be off-balance together.

Not sure if I follow. Don't suppose they care whether or not I follow their thinking, so long as I follow their orders.

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Friday evening, March 11, 2011*<strong>

Finally got back home from our business trip. We've been given the rest of the day off, which should help me get my things back in order, restore the use of my brain, and maybe catch some extra Z's. God, how I hate traveling.

Sergeant Skitter saw our haul and was happy to say the least. Our gunsmith took a look at it and has given us a better idea of what we have. The two pistols are an IMI Desert Eagle and a Smith & Wesson 500. Skitter wants the revolver, and the mental image of him drawing a bead on a spider with it is a funny one, but I can't think of anything it could do that a carbine or rifle couldn't do better. We'll be donating them to charity for the tax write-off, methinks.

The mutated assault rifles seem to mostly come from the warped imagination of a one Tim LeGendre. Michigan resident. Un compatriote québécois, peut-être? He takes standard rifles like the AR-15, M-14, and M-1 Carbine and rebuilds them for very nonstandard cartridges like .450 Bushmaster and .50 Action Express. I can't see why anyone would design or desire a gun like that. I mean, it may make sense in a place like where I come from, where elk and moose abound, but there are many other firearms that would do just as good for those, and you could probably buy half a dozen of them for the cost of one of these.[3] Still, they'll come in handy for anyone hunting exotic dangerous game, like spiders.

As for the purpose built big-game guns, the ones we have range from the massive .577 Tyranasaurus to the self-parodying .600 Overkill. These will be good on skitters, and even reasonably effective against robots.

The antimaterial rifles are a 1930's vintage Lahti L-39/44 and a modern Anzio Ironworks Heavy Rifle. The former is an aircraft cannon modified (barely) for ground use against tanks and low-flying aircraft, the other was intended for what I can only guess is overcompensation.[4] Both fire 20mm shells, the Anzio fires the same shell as the Vulcan cannon found on some modern aircraft. Quite effective against spiders, robots, and perhaps even bombers if your aim is good. The spiders are funny like that, using any form of indirect-fire artillery or explosive rocketry is a good way to get your whole neighborhood nuked, but so long as you use slug-throwing weapons and line-of-sight explosives they'll restrain themselves to merely trying to plaster you individually.

We did some horsetrading with the motorized company that chauffeured us to determine how to split the loot. We let them have the rocket launchers. Being more mobile than us, they stand a far better chance of shooting and scooting before receiving enemy air mail. They were so happy about getting rockets without a fight that they let us have the lion's share of everything else. Suckers.

The meager food stores we found were mostly freeze-dried #10 cans from a company called Mountain House. I've heard of them before, but don't know much about them. Our members who are into that kind of stuff say that their stuff is among the bust for long-term food caches, but to me the taste is just too alien for a fair ranking.

Neither of us will keep the antimaterial rifles. The Lahti is going to help arm a newly arrived cavalry squadron, and the Anzio is going to a battlegroup that somehow found a considerable stockpile of 20mm Vulcan shells in the area near where Lockheed Marietta used to be. That's probably for the best, because if I'm not mistaken, the Vulcan uses depleted uranium in its shells, and what's the point of beating the aliens if we all die of leukemia? Why can't we find a way to safely dispose of carcinogenic munitions and protect the environment? Even if I personally stop this alien invasion, what kind of planet will we be leaving to our children? And our children's children, and... oh the humanity![5]

Um, I just reread what I wrote up there and... well, I think I really should turn in early tonight.

* * *

><p>1. Reference to the Hadendoa tribe of East Africa, who fought against the British during the Madhist War. Though suffering heavy losses, they gained the respect of many British soldiers for breaking their defensive infantry squares with a cavalry charge, something that even the armies of Napoleon had consistently failed at.<p>

2. Long time anchorwoman for WSB-TV Channel 2, a station known for being sensationalist even by the low standards of local affiliates.

3. The MAG1/14/15 series actually do have a justification for existing. Tim LeGendre designed the "heavy assault rifles" for soldiers manning checkpoints who might need to quickly take down a civilian vehicle, possibly one reinforced with simple armour. The idea is that soldiers trained in the use of the standard arms could use these and benefit from the previous muscle memory. That said, the shells seem to me like they're at the fringe of what those systems can handle, and I have to wonder just how many shells they could send downrange before you start seeing malfunctions.

4. Anzio was designed with the idea of close-range defense for warships, as a means of preventing another USS Cole-style attack on one anchored in port, for example. More recently, the FBI has acquired a few with an eye towards events like the Killdozer Incident.

5. It might seem counter-intuitive to worry about possible health problems that your ammunition may cause in the future, so long as it causes definite health problems to your enemies now. But remember that Sarah is a hippy at heart, firearms proficiency notwithstanding, and not even an alien apocalypse will completely change that.

Of course the .gov's, .mil's, and .biz's all insist that the .org's are wrong and there's little or no danger posed by depleted uranium munitions (assuming that one is not being shot at with them). But then again, didn't they say much the same about DDT, Agent Orange and asbestos?

* * *

><p><strong><em>RIP AND TEAR YOUR GUTS!<em>**


	22. Chapter 22: Infiltration

_Said England unto Pharaoh, "You've had miracles before,_  
><em>When Aaron struck your rivers into blood;<em>  
><em>But if you watch the Sergeant he can show vou something more.<em>  
><em>He's a charm for making riflemen from mud."<em>  
><em>It was neither Hindustani, French, nor Coptics;<em>  
><em>It was odds and ends and leavings of the same,<em>  
><em>Translated by a stick (which is really half the trick),<em>  
><em>And Pharaoh harked to Sergeant Whatisname.<br>_-Pharaoh and the Sergeant, by Rudyard Kipling

* * *

><p><strong>*interlude*<br>22 February, 2011  
>Dalton, Georgia, USA<br>**

"My name is Sergeant Major Jake Mosovich." The lights of the hall glinted from the silver badge on his green beret.

It was, Jake had decided, a singularly inappropriate environment. But the reception hall of the First Baptist Church was packed to overflowing with a wide mixture of people: native redneck types, transplanted yuppies, and inter-city refugees. The old, the young and the female were to be found in disproportionate numbers, as many military-age men were already fighting in Atlanta. All of them were gathered at tables piled with an odd assortment of weapons, household items and general bric-a-brac. The ad-hoc Special Forces team, old hands and fresh blood that had been picked up along the way as needed, was scattered throughout the room prepared to train or intervene, whichever seemed necessary.

"I am a twenty-five-year veteran of the United States Army Special Forces: We're called The Green Berets. We are one of the special operations units your tax dollars have supported for years, so now you get to get some of your own back." As usual that was good for a small laugh.

"The mission of the Special Forces is to train indigenous forces in irregular tactics. What that means is that we are supposed to go into countries and teach guerillas that are friendly to the United States how to be better guerillas. Officially, we have never performed our stated mission." He smiled grimly and there was a round of chuckles. Some of them got it.

"But it is what we are trained to do. And partisans, in general, do not have access to regular weapons or equipment. They have to make do with what's around. And they don't work with huge supply systems, the 'tail' as we military folks call it."

His face turned grim. Combined with the scars it made him look like something from a nightmare. "We all know now what's out there," he said, gesturing at the ceiling and by extension into space. "And we all know that humanity isn't ready to send them back where they belong. Civilization is taking too long to reorganize. And if we're not ready when we hit them again, we'd do more harm than good to any chances of our species remaining the dominant one on this planet. So our strategy is one of... containment."

He chuckled grimly at that term. Containment hadn't worked against communism, and he had to wonder if such dawdling was just giving the aliens more time to bring in reinforcements. But higher authorities, such as they were, had made their decision, and they did need to know more about their threat before they could hope to dislodge it.

"I suppose that's why you people volunteered for this regiment; you don't need me to tell you that every square foot of our planet that they take is gonna make it harder for us to win this war in the long run."

"So, we are here to teach you all we can about how to survive when you go down to Atlanta. How to live and fight without much in the way of support or regular weapons. We're hoping that it will give you an edge if it comes time that you are at the wall. Maybe it will, maybe it won't." He tapped his camouflage-clad chest, looking at one little girl. "That is right in here."

"Many if not most of you already know how to use your guns to put meat on the table, and that's good. But you'll need to know more than that when your quarry shoots back at you. We're going to teach you how to act, think, and operate like soldiers. We can't do much of that in the short time we have, but what we will show you will be the difference between a military formation and an armed mob. And, we do intend to teach you plenty of fun things as well."

* * *

><p>"Okay, what's this?" Sergeant First Class David Mueller asked the group of churchgoers, holding up a white plastic bottle of a name-brand cleaner. They had broken up into groups for specialized sessions and analysis. They would be looking for leaders and individuals who showed special talents. So far Mueller was pretty sure he had picked out some team leaders. And he suspected the two teenaged girls— not sisters, but might as well be— would turn out to be pretty talented at mayhem.<p>

"Bleach," the girl blurted, with a "what, you don't know bleach when you see it, Yankee?" look in her eye.

"Really? Okay, and what's this?" he asked, holding up a translucent bottle of clear liquid.

" 'Monia?"

"Right. And what do you use 'em for?"

"Cleaning stuff," said an older gentleman in the second row.

"Well, I admit I've used them for that, but what I usually use them for is blowing stuff up." He could see he got their attention then. "You can use these, and some other common products, to produce explosives." To their obvious amazement, he then proceeded to demonstrate the entire process of making a pipe bomb from start to finish.

"Now, you can get slow fuse for the detonator from a gun shop, they use it for hobby cannons and some muzzle loaders, or I'll show you a couple of ways to make it yourself. Also, later on I'll be showing you ways to make a nifty trip-wire booby trap with a pistol or rifle cartridge and some string. If you put more liquid in the mix you get slurry, and I'll show you some neat stuff to do with slurry later. But first, I want you all to make your own pipe bombs, being very careful to follow the steps exactly as I showed you.

Afterwards, we'll go over to that old house on the corner, the one that was a meth lab, and blow that SOB sky-high."

Most of them seemed to like that idea.

* * *

><p><strong>10 March, 2011<br>Harland Terrace, Atlanta, Georgia, USA  
><strong>

The rain came as a steady drizzle, falling throughout the afternoon and tapering off at sunset. There was a very brilliant rainbow set against the dark grey overcast of the eastern sky; it provided a morale-boost to the human defenders that would be sorely needed for the coming night.

Skirmish after skirmish played itself out in more or less the same fashion. Warriors and drones came at the human defenses like a hurricane, the humans could usually drive them back once or maybe twice, but would eventually be forced to give ground and reorganize another defense. Casualties were heavy on both sides; it was a grueling kind of war that seldom favoured the defender, unless he could pull a rabbit from his hat.

Robert Williams Clifton and his company were to be that rabbit. While the enemy busied themselves breaking through the Peyton Road Barricades (Robert never could find out why the locals got such a chuckle from that term)[1], his teams would sneak around and hit them in the rear.

The enemy seemed to be getting better at protecting their flanks, and sneaking around them wasn't the simple matter that it had been in Candler-McAfee. Fortunately for the humans, the specific area they were defending had once been the site of several high-rise, high-class apartment buildings, each boasting subbasements connected by a series of surprisingly spacious utility tunnels. Someone had theorized that these might have been built with disasters in mind, and the fact that they mostly survived the leveling of the above-ground structures seemed to lend credence to that theory.

"Ten minutes, people!" called out Robert as his soldiers went topside "If we haven't disengaged by then they'll either have strikers above us or follow-on forces surrounding us, so I want us gone in ten minutes!"

"Well lessee, Cap. That leaves nine minutes to shoot the Hell out of 'em. And my gun shoots six-hundred rounds a minute. So how many of 'em does I getta got before I gotta get?"

"Don't ask me to do no math for you, Lieutenant Simons. Just kill as many as you can!"

A Company advanced by the blast of satchel charges and sticky bombs thrown by some very brave forward scouts[2]. Rifle-grenades added to the fray, and the surviving warriors were met with bullets and buckshot as they closed in a desperate attempt to take some of the ambushers with them.

Four times that night they went forth to ambush the enemy, and three of those ambushes went more-or-less perfectly. They trapped the oncoming wave in a hammer-and-anvil movement between themselves and the barricades, while a third force held the next wave at bay. The fourth skirmish was more problematic, and very nearly became the only one that mattered that night.

Firing on the walk, Robert put a short burst into a warrior as it emerged from the darkness. He stopped, went prone, and continued firing at silhouettes caught in the light beam of a nearby drone. Those were going to become a problem, as his group was fresh out of anything that could reliably hurt them. They deployed smoke to better hide themselves from drone weaponry, but reduced visibility only increased their vulnerability to melee attacks by warriors.

He reached a shallow drainage ditch and took up a firing position at the crest of it, along with the remnants of his unit. In his initial ambush force of one hundred men, only twenty were accounted for, and a quarter of those were in stretchers. He didn't know where the rest were, and he wasn't even sure where he was.

"Sergeant Sullivan, you're from around here. You got any idea how we can get back to the interstate?"

"Nah, man. I lived here before it became a bombed-out hellscape."

"Hostiles, four o' clock! Incoming!"

They opened up, half-blind, at the new threat boiling out of a nearby line of warehouses. One of the drones exploded violently, not from anything his team had on them. Another went down, and the sound of human weapons could be heard barking from the inside of the warehouse. Automatic and sniper weapons were reaping a terrible harvest on those forces caught in the open, despite the now-choking levels of smoke.

"Who's that?" yelled Sullivan "How are they hitting anything in this smoke?"

"Who cares?" replied Roberts "They're on our side and they seem to know what they're doing!"

* * *

><p><strong>1 March, 2011<br>Fairmount, Georgia, USA  
><strong>

Mosovich watched as the squadron went through their drills: dismounting, unlimbering their heavy guns, and bringing it into play against the hypothetical enemy. Special forces were still trained to use horses and other animals in niche roles, but much of what they were teaching in this war hadn't seen common use since the earliest days of the Second World War.

"They're good" said Mosovich.

"They're my pupils. Your's too, mostly." said Brad Hall, rocking back and forth on his cane. "The night vision scopes you gave us for the heavy rifles are going to be quite a surprise to our mechanical friends, methinks."[4]

"Ingenious contraptions, they are. Shame that our production and miniaturization abilities aren't good enough for wider issue." said Donald Kasparek, who had been coming down from his mountain more often while the SF team was around. The relationship between the hermit and the soldiers didn't seem to be a bubbling friendship, but there was a definite sense of camaraderie amongst them.

"I'll give your regards to the Doctor when I reach Alabama. We leave tonight."

"They're going to Alpharetta tomorrow. All except a few including your Daughters of Thunder, I think you called them. They have a special assignment on the Westside."

* * *

><p>1. The special forces team from John Ringo's Legacy of Aldenata. In my timeline, they survive the initial assault and go to work as freelance personal trainers throughout the Southeast.<p>

(it seems a bit ironic that even before the Second Season started, I had intended to base them somewhere in upcountry North Carolina along with other remnants of the Federal Government)

2. Peyton Road leads down to Cascade Heights, a majority-black, majority-rich Atlanta suburb. Pretty much every serious Atlanta mayoral candidate and most of Atlanta's black celebrities have a house in the area. In the 1960's it was majority-white and the locals tried to keep it that way by erecting barricades on the north end of the road, thus preventing potential home-seekers from reaching the city from what is now Martin Luther King Drive.

3. A bomb with a stick on one end and glue or a magnet on the other. Slightly more effective against armour than a Molotov. The British, Russians, Germans and Japanese all produced variants of these light, cheap, handheld anti-tank weapons for their infantry during their more desperate hours in the Second World War. The Japanese saw them as suicide weapons; the others did too but they didn't let their own soldiers in on that fact.

4. Germany and America both made use of rifle-mounted night-vision devises in near the end of World War II. Such technology could conceivably be replicated even in a world without solid-state transistors. In terms of quality, it would probably be similar to the Starlight scopes issued to US soldiers in Vietnam.


	23. Chapter 23: The Smell of Death

_"And this is all that remains of Memphis, oldest of cities: a few rubbish heaps- a dozen or so broken statues and a name.. Where are the stately ruins which even in the Middle Ages extended over the space of a half-a-day's journey in each direction? One can hardly believe that a great city flourished on this spot or understand how it should have been effaced so utterly."  
><em>-Amelia Edwards, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Monday morning, March 14th, 2011*<strong>  
>Sent and received some telegrams from Colonel Berry again, as well as some mail. Inventories on our food, medical, and other essential stores, which should give our scavengers an idea on what we have and what we need.<p>

There was also some notices on keeping a level of healthy diet and sanitation in hard times. One of these, intended for distribution to our NCOs, said more-or-less that anyone who hasn't proven themselves to understand life in our new world should be watched over like toddlers to make sure they don't drink from water near sewage mains or poop/litter near where you're trying to live and sleep.

People don't realize that outhouses/latrines exist for very good a reason? Good Lord![1]

I see flyers all over the city warning about bad food and water, almost as often as I see the ones about how to evade robots and kill spiders. I would have thought that the more ignorant amongst us would have learned (or died) by now.

I'd like to hit another library, or a decent study, preferably one at a hospital or medical college. Maybe it's just hyperbole, but I've been hearing a lot of horror stories about untrained medical staff and lost limbs and lives that a more properly-educated staff could have saved. I know that novice healthcare is better than no healthcare, but if this is a problem that can be fixed than we would do well to try.

Breakfast is over. More later.

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Monday evening, March 14th, 2011*<strong>  
>Some interesting events took place in Harland Terrace. Some of the local forces, aided by cadres from the heavy fighting in Candler-McAfee, have been dealing out a great deal of damage to advancing spider forces, making flank attacks on them when they go up against the barricades (must have a trick up their sleeve or an incompetent enemy, because up here the spiders have learned to diffuse that human trick). They almost got their goose cooked a few nights back, but managed to egress with the aid of one of the fresh militia regiments.<p>

Here's an interesting story from Hapeville: the city fell a few days ago and the spiders are advancing onto Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, but there's still some resistance in this great big Wells Fargo Bank, where the defenders are trying to pull their own version of Sihang Warehouse.[2] Apparently the building was designed to withstand attacks by robbers, armed mobs, insurgents, professional commandoes, really anything short of nuke which they may well have to use to take it.

Between Candler-McAfee, Westview, Hapeville and all the other grisly pitched battles that have been occurring down there, when this is all over I don't think we'll be saying that the South Side fought like heroes, but that heroes fight like South Side.

* * *

><p><strong>*[Tuesday Afternoon, March 15th, 2011]*<strong>  
>mssiv spdr fors hdng up w lk av, 3, 4 plt to intrcpt now!<p>

[Addendum: Massive spider force heading up West Lake Avenue {right towards our company headquarters at Grove Park Elementary School}, 3rd and 4th platoons to intercept now!]

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Friday night, March 19th, 2011*<br>**For the last few days our company has been fully engaged in Grove Park and Dixie Hills. Seems the spiders decided they were going to go from probing to launching a full-on assault in this area. Casualties taken have been moderate, as have those inflicted. Regiment has sent reinforcements into this area, and they may have to pull a few out from the fighting in Westhaven, or hope that we can beg some more warm bodies off the still relatively quiet Northern Front.

The fighting brought us back near the freeways and the MARTA tracks. I don't recall it stinking so much the last time I was down here. I also don't recall the whole neighborhood being in ruins. The place is looking more and more like it did in those pictures from back in 1864. I saw a sinkhole with a MARTA bus half submerged in the brackish water. There was a dead dog floating in that water too, half-rotted and bloated from the heat.

It hit 80 degrees today. I sure hope the spiders have as much fun acclimating to the Georgia summers as I did.

* * *

><p>1. Stalkere and I discussed health problems via PM. He's worked on humanitarian relief efforts in the aftermath of hurricanes, and the average American is apparently far more ignorant in maintaining their health in a disaster than I would have ever thought. I guess when you grow up in the country you know to be careful with home-canned goods, and that even crystal-clear creek water can potentially kill you.<p>

2. In 1937, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, near the end of the Battle of Shanghai, a force of 423 men took up defenses in a large warehouse and held it against a Japanese division from the 26th of October to the 1st of November. They suffered ten killed while inflicting two hundred casualties before ordered to withdraw, and they had fully intended to hold the warehouse to the last.

The Japanese weren't able to use mustard gas or heavy artillery in an area so close to the Foreign Concessions. Similarly, the alien commander in my little world probably won't use nukes or heavy bombing on a structure so close to a rail yard or airport, if it can be avoided. Maybe all of them are like that in the ABA world, or maybe this one is just quirky.


	24. Chapter 24: Lives the Fire

_"We live in a machine age. To maintain prosperity we must keep the machines working, for when machines are functioning men can labor and earn wages. The good citizen does not repair the old; he buys anew. The shoes that crack are to be thrown away. Don't patch them. When the car gets crotchety, haul it to the town's dump. Give to the ashman's oblivion the leaky pot, the broken umbrella, the clock that doesn't tick. To maintain prosperity we must keep those machines going."_  
>- Richardson Wright<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*interlude*<br>7 March, 2011  
>Huntsville, Alabama, USA<br>**

In many ways, the situation in Alabama mirrored that in Georgia: there was a tower going up over the largest city, the other big ones had suffered recurrent bombing and the state suffered heavy collateral damage as its many military bases were wiped off the face of the Earth.

In Huntsville, Redstone Arsenal was gone, so was the Marshall Space Flight Center and much of the Cummings Research Park (hard to tell if that one was deliberate or not). Much of the riverfront area had been flooded when the TVA dams got hit, and there had been scattered ground-raids up and down I-65.

Dylan Weaver, PhD (no family, as far as he knows, native to Boston) was formerly a well-respected theoretical physicist with doctorates in everything from engineering to astronomy, one of a corps of specialists, often referred to as Beltway Bandits, who solved problems for the military and other branches of the U.S. government, generally having acronyms that had an "A" on the end. NSA, CIA, DIA...

Which was why he'd been shanghaied one Saturday afternoon to explain alien invasions to the National Security Council when some rather disconcerting things started appearing over the skies of Earth's major cities. While the two men seldom agreed on politics, the Commander in Chief was something of a geek and "Doc" Weaver was a popular science-fiction author who had literally helped write the book on the hypotheticals of defending Earth from potentially-hostile aliens.

The Feds took the advice, pondered it, and then more or less sat on it. Weaver put as many miles between himself and the Beltway as he possibly could. Credentialed though he was, he was a country boy at heart who knew good and well that an urban setting just wasn't the place to be when ET came calling. In the remnants of the Rocket City, he and his team of backwoods geniuses were working to solve problems for the Alabama Militia.

* * *

><p><strong>12 March, 2011<strong>

"Daddy" Weaver and the others popped open some of their few remaining beer cans in celebration of another finished project. He had been an original rocket scientist, having worked at NASA with Wernher Von Braun to build America's first satellites. "I'd like to see those city-boys at MIT come up with a solution like this." he said.

"What?" asked Rob Jones, friend of Doc's since their grade school days. "Using vacuum tubes in place of integrated circuits and transistors? Shucks, that ain't so clever."[1]

"Using mason jars for vacuum tubes is pretty clever, though." noted Doc. "Though I don't think the folks at MIT are thinking much of anything these days; from what I saw on my way out, I would be very surprised if there are many humans left in the major northeastern cities."

It was but a concept piece of course; design would be further improved and would likely make use of purpose-built tubes from the state's growing glazing industry. Canning jars would be kept for the purpose of canning.

Daddy took another sip of beer. "Well I know one thing: the reconditioned trucks we've been putting in the convoys to Birmingham will be far less thirsty when it comes to fuel. That means more fuel for them and for the Fall Harvest, and that means more humans on this planet come Spring."

"Well, we've produced a lot of technology to make fighting this war easier, next we need to produce some that'll win it." said Paul Hochstetler, late of Holmes County, Ohio. An employee of Pioneer Equipment, Inc,[2] he traveled throughout North Alabama helping farmers plan for the transitions which everyone knew would soon be necessary. When possible, he worked alongside the Rocket City Rednecks, making up for members of the brain trust who had gone to war. He had been instrumental in helping them build wagons out of junked pickup trucks,[3] and surprisingly helpful in home brewing the multialkali photocathodes for their night vision scopes.

Doc Weaver finished his can and gave it a toss towards the recycling bin. It would eventually find its way to a repurposed old steel mill in Decatur, where it might be melted and used in the frame of a stretcher, or powdered and used to make thermite. "You know, I've been doing a lot of thinking about that. If this were a science-fiction movie we'd probably see some brilliant scientists or courageous soldiers developing a silver bullet of some kind to kill all the aliens: maybe a spaceship to take the fight to their world, maybe something to mess with their communications, maybe a literal bullet that'll allow small arms to defy physics and punch through their armour."

"Maybe if we wait long enough, they'll all die of the common cold." said Hochstetler, who'd been taking a crash course on English conceptions of what an event like this might look like. "Failing that, we could always give them a computer virus. How many vacuum tubes would we need to rebuild a Macintosh Powerbook?"[4]

"And who knows, we may well do something like that; I believe in miracles, reluctant though I am to bet on them. More likely, I think tinkering with existing technology would be a far better use of our time than trying to design new ones. Tactical lasers would be incredibly useful right now, but the time to develop and field them would have been before our heavy industry had been annihilated; I can't see us building one in dad's garage."[5]

"Let alone powering it; I am NOT letting you build a nuclear reactor in here." There were laughs all around from that one.

"Anyway, this is all very interesting, but I'm going to bed if it's all the same to everyone." said Rob "Tomorrow's the start of another work week and we're all expected to lend a hand on the local chicken farms."

"Nothing but fun to be found around those." said Doc, grimacing.

* * *

><p>1. Stalkere noted that vacuum tube ignition systems would probably be unnecessary, as most vehicles could be made to run again with mechanical ignitions. He's right, but I still thought the basic idea was funny, so I decided to keep it.<p>

2. Amish-owned company famous for their rugged and well-designed forecarts. A forecart is an animal-drawn cart designed to be used before (in front of) a farming implement such a trailer, seed drill, harrow, or manure spreader. They can use pretty much any devise that a small tractor can, and can even be fitted with a gasoline or diesel engine to run a power take-off.

3. Similar to the Hoover Wagons of Depression era fame (an automobile with the engine components removed, driver's seat put in its place and wagon tongue connected to the front suspension—the ones you see pictures of will usually have the outer body intact, but old-timers tell me that they were often stripped down to the frame), people will often cut a junked pickup truck in half and weld an A-frame ball coupler to the front, thereby creating a simple two-wheeled trailer. Hitch to forecart and you have an improvised wagon.

4. Enough to fill multiple shipping containers, no doubt.

5. People got the wrong idea from the Manhattan Project, which allowed us to finish World War II with a cinematic bang (as opposed to just gassing the Japanese into submission, which is what would have probably happened otherwise). A more pertinent historical example would be the German Wunderwaffe: it has been argued, convincingly I think, that German defeat would have been delayed (not averted, that ship sailed when the first jackboot set foot in commie territory) had they focused on producing more feasible, conventional weaponry like the Volkssturmgewehrs and Einstossflammenwerfer.


	25. Chapter 25: Seeing the Elephant

_"I can still see Frankie, drinking tinnies in the Grand Hotel_  
><em>On a thirty-six hour rec leave in Vung Tau<em>  
><em>And I can still hear Frankie, lying screaming in the jungle<em>  
><em>Til the morphine came and killed the bloody row.<em>

_And the Anzac legends didn't mention mud and blood and tears_  
><em>And the stories that my father told me never seemed quite real.<em>  
><em>I caught some pieces in my back that I didn't even feel<em>  
><em>God help me, I was only nineteen."<em>

-Redgum, I Was Only Nineteen

* * *

><p><strong>*[Diary Entry: Sunday Night, March 20, 2011]*<br>**lyin n nfrmry rt nw w/ sum dzn othr frm th coy. We r toast. Coy's str dwn 30%, plat str dwn 70%. In my squad, I alone survive.

[Translation: I'm lying in the infirmary right now with some dozen others from my company. We're toast. My company's strength is down by 30%, platoon strength by 70%.

I rewrote a significant portion of this entry several weeks after the events described. Between my injuries and emotional state at the time, it really was almost unreadable]

If this seems like a hard read, it's because I'm using my off-hand.

Got shot. Plasma beam. Neck, upper back, left shoulder all seriously injured. [The beam didn't actually hit me, but came close enough that I suffered shrapnel injuries on my left side as well as second degree burns to about 6% of my body. It would have been even worse if my helmet and vest hadn't taken the brunt of the damage]

Platoon was on patrol along Tiger Flowers Drive, got hit by spider and robot forces. We fell back and took shelter in a brick house. They brought it down around us. Ran down the street, got overtaken by spiders and had to fight them hand-to-hand. Retreated in face of fresh spiders, overtaken again. This continued for several blocks.

[This entire paragraph is illegible. Even I don't know what I was trying to say.]

There was this one guy from A squad: farm boy from Nebraska, fellow Georgia Tech student, I'd known him before the war and really liked him. Good fighter, good person. He always told he felt like a fugue [fugitive?] from the law of averages. Never really knew what he meant by that.

He was running up ahead of me, and I thought I saw him trip and fall. [illegible] I and Corporal Jenson tried to help him up, and that's when we got a good look at what was left of his face.

We dropped him and kept running. There was nothing else we could do.

After the squads split up, I made my way back up along a creek bed to Joseph E Boone Boulevard. Must have passed out, because search dogs found me after dark in a half-flooded parking lot.

So, like I said, here I lay in the infirmary at the school. I'm seriously injured, in great pain, but so many people have it worse than me that I'd feel terrible complaining. Medical team says my wounds are not life-threatening. Doing everything they can to prevent an infection. They want to get me to the regimental hospital as quickly as possible, but I'm not sure when or if that can happen.

All around I hear constant gunfire. All of Grove Park is under attack, spiders are drawing nearer, and we've been subject to several devastating airstrikes. We may start evacuation within the next few days. The rest of the Regiment is bracing themselves for a push on Blandtown, which looks like their main objective. I have no knowledge of conditions elsewhere in our part of the city.

So exhausted. Going to try getting some sleep, and will try and remember to thank Rev. Jenifer for bringing my diary to me if I see her tomorrow.


	26. Chapter 26: A Case of the Skitters

_And can you tell me, doctor, why I still can't get to sleep?  
>And why the Channel Seven chopper chills me to my feet?<br>And what's this rash that comes and goes, can you tell me what it means?  
>God help me, I was only nineteen. <em>  
>-Redgum, I Was Only Nineteen<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*Diary Entry: Tuesday Morning, March 22, 2011*<br>**Change of plans: I'll be evacuated to the hospital in Smyrna this evening.

I feel terrible.

I feel really terrible.

I threw up, then I made a mess in my pants.

Crippling diarrhea, lethargy, haven't been able to hold down anything for the last few days.

Burns on my back and bugs in my gut? Nevermind that we seem to be losing ground everywhere. Jesus, this is turning out to be an awful week. I don't know what else to say.

I think I may be dying.


	27. Chapter 27: Hospitallers

_"It is in the nature of medicine, that you *are* gonna screw up; you *are* gonna kill someone. If you can't handle that reality, pick another profession. Or, finish medical school and teach."_  
>-Gregory House<p>

* * *

><p><strong>*interlude*<br>**24 March, 2011**  
>1st Divisional Hospital, 5th Brigade<br>Smyrna, Georgia, USA  
><strong>

Few in the Angloshpere had the luck of inheriting a name like Loon. Fewer still had parents with the unsoundness of mind to precede this originally-Dutch surname (shortened from Van Loon) with the given name of Hamlet.

Hamlet Loon, M.D. wasn't remarkable by the standards of the day. He was unkempt, but everyone was unkempt. He generally didn't speak unless he had to, but many people were getting short on words. When he did speak, it was often for the purpose of carrying a one-way conversation with his dead wife or missing children... well, that was still considered somewhat different, but he was at least cognizant enough not to do it in front of his patients very often.

Still, bringing him bad news was not a task that his subordinates relished, which is why they usually did so in pairs.

"They gave STEROIDS to cholera patients!? What POSSIBLE REASON could they have for doing that!?" asked Dr. Loon, his voice reverberating off the walls of his small office.

"They didn't have antibiotics." said Denise Clifton. Best to just get it out quickly and get it over with.

"They were using it to treat a TB case, and thought steroids would help until they could get their next shipment of ciprofloxacin or doxycycline." added Ben Matlock, whom Dr. Loon liked a little better.

"And you said that at least one of them is a burn patient too?"

They nodded. Lighting was crashing in the doctor's eyes as he put both elbows on his desk and hands over his mouth, staring straight ahead for several seconds before giving them both a look of "this-is-why-I-really-went-crazy".

"Well... This is the problem with the Regimental Hospitals. They're plumbers; great for plugging up leaks, but you have to be real careful about letting them anywhere near the medicine cabinet."

"...and we'll have to clean their mess up. Given how quickly cholera kills, we may lose them even if we can keep them hydrated." said Denise.

"Depends on what genetic strain we're dealing with." noted Ben. "They would be dead already if it was one of the really bad ones like what hit Haiti after the earthquakes. If it's one of the milder ones then replacing lost fluids and electrolytes should be enough."

"You're probably right, Joseph." said Dr. Loon, in a completely new tone and to someone who was not physically present. "But I don't think we should be too hard on the regiments. After all, things like this happened in the old world too, far more often than most would really want to know."

* * *

><p><strong>13 April, 2011<strong>

The cholera patients were treated and all but two made a reasonably prompt recovery. Of the exceptions, one had died and the other steadily worsened over the course of several days. It soon became clear that she was not quite like the others.

Cholera diagnosis discarded, it was speculated that Giardia might be the true culprit. Or perhaps Cryptosporidium or Amebic Dysentery. They couldn't know for sure; Giardiasis was hard to conclusively diagnose even in good conditions, and the germ-ridden waters had only been further muddied by her recent wounds and the earlier malpractice case.

Sergeant Jake Mosovich was passing through Atlanta again on his way to the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis. With him were a number of doctors and researchers, who hoped to study (and hopefully learn how to remove) harnesses in more appropriate facilities. While traveling through the area, they would often stop and set up workshops for medical personnel. His own medics helped out where they could; the SF's homegrown medical teams knew that they were, to quote one unconventional warfare expert, inferior to a drunk M.D. on his worst day, but they were used to being the only thing available and could most certainly impart some knowledge to the guerrilla medical personnel who had found work in militia hospitals throughout America.

Denise Clifton welcomed the chance to expand her skills, even though she had been given quite a bit of on-the-job-training already. In addition to her main task as a pathology nurse, she had learned quite a bit about bone fractures, shock, gunshots wounds, plasma and burn trauma, explosion and shrapnel wounds, and even emergency surgery.

"How's SWT doing?" asked Dr. Loon as he made his rounds. He wasn't even going to try to pronounce Sarah Tagliabue's name; her French-Canadian father had gifted her with, of all things, a Lombard surname that brought almost as much confusion as her sickness.[1]

"Better." said Denise. "Still diarrhoeal, still a little delirious, but she's drinking and eating on her own, talking again and even moving around a bit."

"Good to know. How are you doing?"

Denise murmured. She was trying to hide it, but was obviously just about to crash. With major assaults and air raids coming almost around the clock, these last few days had not been kind to their medical personel. Even with the extra help, Dr. Loon had seen quite a few of his aides and nurses literally sleeping where they fell while tending to the patients. More than a few were keeping their tanks filled with nothing but willpower and amphetamines.

"Denise, go to bed. You'll have plenty of work tomorrow and we really don't need any zombies in the operating room."

Murmuring again, Denise trudged off to her quarters. Tomorrow did bring plenty of work along with all the other usual aspects of their existence: more suffering, more wounded, more dead.

* * *

><p><strong>14 April, 2011<strong>

Sarah woke up early and began wandering aimlessly around the common area of the hospital, never further than a stone's throw from the latrines. It wasn't until early afternoon that anyone took notice of her.

"Um, excuse me ma'am, is there any way I can help you?"

"Uh... yes... do you know... where I can get something to write with?"

* * *

><p>1. Tag-lee-a-bwey, I think. Maybe. Even I don't know for sure.<p> 


	28. Chapter 28: Opposition Forces

_"I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black."_  
>-Walden, Henry David Thoreau<p>

* * *

><p>"Now I draw your attention to the second quintant. Our sweeps along the transportation routes that bound it, while successful in gaining needed materials, have been far less lucrative than expected.[1] Attempts to eradicate the remaining human resistance has been unsuccessful, but I believe that an advance along a broad front may be a more effective tactic than focusing on the largest of the interstates. We've been using similar tactics, on a smaller scale, in the first and fifth quintant and results have been most satisfactory. Had we done so in the fourth quintant, perhaps we would not have performed so poorly.<p>

Specifically, we should seek to take the area around this, the Bellwood Quarry and these rail yards. It's an open area, difficult to defend, and its capture would prevent them from harassing us so easily with their fast-moving, non-committed 'reserve' forces which have been the bane of so many of our sweeps. If we can break them here and deploy our forces across the river, it should allow us to move seamlessly towards the objective for the next phase."

"Which are?"

"These two smaller, satellite cities: Marbleton and Smyrna. Both are necessary for the humans to sustain those who fight against us, but they're well-protected against our atmospheric craft and the forces therein are dispersed and concealed such that even the highest-yield bombs are not economical against them. However, a thorough ground attack should be able to eliminate human formations within the area, while giving us enough augments and raw material to make up for any losses."

"Speaking of atmospheric craft, how much air support will we have?"

"Enough, but not as much as we'd like; the overlord in charge of the aerial sector has been cleared to attack smaller gatherings of humans—those numbering about six hundred and over—and his restrictions against killing potential augments have been loosened. So he'll be splitting the difference between attacking their nearby settlements and lending aid to my troops, with most of his effort going to the former."

"The humans placed a dichotomy between strategic and tactical air operations, as we may eventually have to do."[2]

"Perhaps, but it's irrelevant to our current objectives. What about the third quintant?"

"Still indecisive. We seldom have trouble taking control of specific areas when we want them, but no sooner do we divert our forces elsewhere than they launch attacks on whatever we've left behind. They move through the ruins with uncanny stealth, and make use of their borrowings— basements, tunnels, etc.— in a manner that our forces still find very hard to react against.

"I believe that if we advance further into the adjacent quintants, it would greatly assist in our attempts to hold down that one. I also believe that more of our units should be sent on long-range patrols in the mid-to-far outlying area as this seems to damage the fighting effectiveness of their committed units."

"Very well. You may continue your operation, and we look forward to its efficient and successful conclusion."

* * *

><p>1. When I first started writing this, I fired up Google Earth, looked up the approximate location of the CNN building, set eye level to about 50 miles up, flipped the map sideways with labels and borders turned off, and tried to use this unique perspective to visualize the area through alien eyes. What might stand out to them?<p>

Browns and greens of farms and forests around the city, the occasional black and blue of lakes and rivers, and long tendrils of grey and white from human development (infestation?) coming out of the centre. These aliens will be most interested in the latter, and what of that might catch their eye?

Well, there are some pretty massive manmade complexes around Atlanta: Hartsfield International Airport, the rail yards in Blandtown, and the warehouse district in Campbellton.

But what really stands out are those grey and white tendrils. Atlanta went seamlessly from being a railroad city to a highway city and it's very hard to think of any future conflicts there without taking the major highways into consideration.

2. Pick your enemies carefully, for you will become very much like them, and they very much like you.

This can be applied to tactics and equipment as well as social and political philosophies. Consider the "rockets red glare" of the American national anthem: used against coastal forts by the British who had encountered similar weapons in their wars against Kingdom of Mysore in India. These had been introduced to the "sub"continent (I've always felt that South Asia was culturally and geographically distinct enough to count as a seperate continent) by the invading Mongols, against whom they had been used by the Chinese, who had been the ones to actually invent them.


	29. Chapter 29: Rail Duty

_"Born of a railroad, Atlanta grew as its railroads grew. With the completion of the four lines, Atlanta was now connected with the West, with the South, with the Coast and, through Augusta, with the North and East. It had become the crossroads of travel north and south and east and west, and the little village leaped to life._

_For the past year, she had been so engrossed in her own woes, so bored by any mention of war, she did not know that from the minute the fighting first began, Atlanta had been transformed. The same railroads which had made the town the crossroads of commerce in time of peace were now of vital strategic importance in time of war. Far from the battle lines, the town and its railroads provided the connecting link between the two armies of the Confederacy, the army in Virginia and the army in Tennessee and the West. And Atlanta likewise linked both of the armies with the deeper South from which they drew their supplies. Now, in response to the needs of war, Atlanta had become a manufacturing center, a hospital base and one of the South's chief depots for the collecting of food and supplies for the armies in the field."_

-Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

* * *

><p><strong>Diary Entry: Thursday Morning, April 14, 2011<br>**The city of Smyrna is starting to wear on me, and I hope I don't come back for a very long time.

I'm still not sure what my condition is. I have only a vague understanding of what's been going on for the last few days, and I know that I'm still not well by any stretch of the imagination. Early on, when I was in the burn ward, I kept having these horrid waking visions of dead flesh being consumed by maggots.[1] Less of that now that I'm back in pathology, but nightmares are still a problem.

They have reliable electric power here, which is very nice. Even if non-essential lighting is still mostly provided by lanterns and candles. They have limited access to X-rays too, which I found to be a wonderful surprise. On the other hand, my infected wounds have been treated with a paste of sugar and soap poultice, which I thought modern medicine had long ago discarded.[2]

My older brother used to do Civil War and World War I reenacting with fellow classmates during his breaks from med school ("Because nothing makes your future look brighter than living out a past that was way, way worse than anything you'll ever experience.") What I've experienced at this hospital is, in my opinion, slightly less viscerally disturbing than some of their historic recreations. The hospital does its best to stay aseptic, so you don't really see piles of severed arms or flies crawling on the wounded or sand on the floor to keep employees from slipping on the blood (though I hear that those closer to the front are not quite so sanitized).

But one thing here that wasn't really accounted for in the reenactments was the smell. A blind patient would never get lost in the divisional hospital, because the burn ward, pathology ward, trauma ward, operations, even recovery and recreation areas all have their unique smell and each is unforgettably terrible.

I've been told that I was babbling in French during much of my time here, and I must have thought I was visiting family. One of the nurses, Denise Clifton, was assigned to translate for me but had a great deal of difficulty doing so, as we speak two very different forms of French (Haitian vs. Canadian)[3] and both second-hand at that. Talking in English is just about as hard: Dirty Souf vs. Snow Hick.[4]

Had a local choir show up and sing for us. Most of them came from Smyrna First Baptist and St. Benedict's Episcopal I think, plus a few children of the hospital workers. Denise's little girl was among them, and I think we all enjoyed the time that those little angels spent with us.

Several people have been making references to something called an SWT, and I'm a little reluctant to admit just how long it took me to realize that they were referring to my initials. Denise says it really stands for "Scrawny White Thing". That's awful cute and I'm a little reluctant to tell her that, technically, I'm at least as black as Tiger Woods.

She wasn't wrong on the scrawny part, though. I don't even want to know how much of my body mass I've puked away. They say I might have giardiasis. My brother had that once, it's quite awful but I've never heard of it causing this much trouble for someone who wasn't already seriously ill.

I overheard something about how difficult giardiasis is to definitively diagnose even with "normal" patients (implication being that I am somehow "abnormal"… oh dear) but, naturally enough, medical workers don't like to discuss things like that with their patients.

Given everyone's work load, I haven't been able to learn much about what's happened to my company since I left. This is what I do know: Grove Park has fallen, or at least all of it below Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway, and the Spiders are fighting their way up Proctor Creek into Rockdale (Fighting for a creek? Not a road or railway? That's different, and I don't like different).

The locomotives themselves aren't running anymore, but control of the area around the rail yards is still very important. If Rockdale falls, it'll split the northwest part of Atlanta in half and make it very difficult for us to move troops or supplies to where they're needed. Denise says I'll need to stay here for about another week to watch for complications, and after that it may still be quite awhile before I can be returned to my unit.

Not going to happen. I will surely go mad if I'm confined to this place while the fate of a regional linchpin hangs in the balance. So if my recovery continues at the current rate, I'm going to sneak out of here soon and get back into the fighting where I belong.

* * *

><p><strong>Diary Entry: Saturday Evening, April 16, 2011<br>**Sitting in the back of a dump truck heading alongside the CVX lines with about fifty others, we're just about to cross the Chattahoochee River. Bumpy ride, makes writing a painful task, but Marietta Boulevard's too clogged and they're worried about air strikes on the bridges. Even now I can hear the sound of gunfire and the roar of the alien craft. It's almost sundown, they expect numerous heavy assaults tonight and we're going right into the fray, so it may be awhile before I can write again.

It was almost comical. I was wondering around, looking for a gun and some ammunition to steal, when a militia officer came in and asked if any of the walking wounded would like to volunteer as of a relief force. Of course I jumped at the call, as did many others. Denise and her coworkers didn't like it very much, but right now we can't be picky about what shape our shooters are in. Not unless she wants us sending (more) children to the front.

So off I go: newish uniform (Polish surplus, urban camo. Doesn't quite fit but it's comfortable), new gun (Carbon-15 Model 4, one of the zillion makes of M-4geries floating around. I'm going to miss my M-14 but, given my present health, the recoil would probably cause me to crap myself with every shot), two hundred rounds of 5.56, and two small sticky bombs for close-in work on robots. I was given some rice cake and a small can of applesauce to help with the diarrhea and at the moment this is my only food supply.

I'm glad I had the chance to meet Mrs. Clifton and the others working to keep the rest of us alive in the Hellish conditions of that hospital. They have my utmost respect and the last thing I want is to see the spiders push through and overrun them.

Lord God of hosts be with us yet,  
>Lest we forget—Lest we forget.<p>

* * *

><p><span>Footnotes:<span>  
>1. Probably not just a vision. Maggot therapy has been and in some cases still is used to remove necrotic tissue from wounds. Napolean's surgeons noted that their patients were more likely to survive if they had been infected with maggots and Confederate surgeons were the first to infect their patients deliberately. The practice is making a comeback in the face of antimicrobial-resistant pathogens. The larvae must be of a specific type (that'll only eat dead tissue while leaving the living parts unharmed), and it requires some special preparation to breed and disinfect them, but such an operation could likely be set up using relatively limited resources.<p>

2. Ah yes, grandma's home remedies. If you take any medical classes and your teacher finds out that you come from the Back Woods or the Old Country, they'll do everything in their power to educate them out of you.

3. French shares much of the oddness often associated with English, including accent diversity. How much difference there is between Metropolitan, Quebec and Haitian French is a matter of contention: some would it's like the difference between BBC, Yooper and Jamaican English while others would say it's like the difference between German, Dutch and Afrikaans.

I'm think intelligibility depends largely on each individual speaker. From my own experience, I recall taking a medical assisting class with a teacher from Cameroon. I had very little trouble understanding his English, but most of my classmates did. On the other hand, few of my classmates had any trouble with my thick Appalachian accent, but my teacher clearly did. Sometimes I have to dip into Spanish or Latin just so fellow anglophones can understand me (ferrium instead of "arn", petrol instead of "awl", lavar instead of "worsh")

4. "Ayuh. Had some wicked good crabs for dinnah."  
>"Say wut? 'ey, you trippin' homes!"<br>(that, incidentally, is why I seldom write dialog and almost never dialect)


	30. Chapter 30: 280 Years of Resistance

_And come tell me Sean O'Farrell where the gath'rin is to be,_  
><em>At the old spot by the river quite well known to you and me,<em>  
><em>One more word for signal token whistle out the marchin' tune,<em>  
><em>With your pike upon your shoulder by the rising of the moon!<em>

_By the rising of the moon, by the rising of the moon,_  
><em>With your pike upon your shoulder by the rising of the moon!<em>

-Rising of the Moon

* * *

><p><strong>*interlude*<br>**28 March, 2011**  
>Near the Saint-Eustache Church<br>Montreal, Québec, Canada  
><strong>

Waiting for his turn to cross the river, Captain Stanley Jamieson of the Mohawk Militia remembered stories that his grandfather had told him about the Moro River Campaign back in 1945. Grandpa never spoke that much about the actual fighting in Ortona or later on in Kapyong, and Father spoke even less about his time in Vietnam, but they did sometimes describe the mixed feelings of anticipation, dread and excitement that preceded each battle.

Bursts of orange and blue lit up the sky and refracted brilliantly on the Mille Îles River as enemy aircraft roared overhead. It would be a beautiful sight, were it not so terrible. The situation on the Îles Laval was very dire: defensive lines below the Autoroute des Laurentides had been breached in the early morning hours and enemy forces were steadily moving through Chomedey against fierce but ineffectually scattered resistance. The decision had been made to evacuate the island, but reinforcements were needed to keep it from falling before they could get all their people off. The Mohawk Nation in Quebec, though already heavily engaged near Brossard and Kahnawake, decided to send a mobile brigade to assist.

By the light of yet another blast, Lieutenant Joseph Mailloux, liaison from the Royal 22e Régiment, said a quick prayer for a cousin in Afghanistan while he stood by his bicycle (most of the brigade would be peddling towards the action; no room on the boats for horses or motorbikes). He too had had a grandfather at Ortona, and a great-grandfather at Passchendaele and Paardeberg. Canadians had fought hard in all those wars, harder than even many Canadians realized.[1] They would fight hard in this one too, and it might even be enough to make the "onyare", as the Mohawk called them, ("cancrelats" as his people called them, or "Grex" in homage to some geeky Internet thing)[2] slow down a bit.

They were doing as well as could be expected considering how long it had been since an enemy set foot on Canadian soil who wasn't an angry Irishman or Native. For his part, Mailloux was glad to have the Natives on his side against the Onyare. When it had first started, he wasn't sure which would try to kill him first.

* * *

><p><strong>27 November, 2010<br>Kanesatake, Québec, Canada**

Canadians had always been among the best on the continent when it came to behaving themselves in a crises, but in the face of inscrutable aliens even they would act predictably human, and the civil strife in Montreal was probably the worst in the country.

The nation, almost by necessity, was under martial law. Most of the civilian leaders had laid out their list of ill-considered, vague and often impossible orders, called up their second-in-commands, congratulated them on the promotions and retired to destinations without spaceships overhead. So the cops and soldiers, those who didn't do likewise, were left to keep their countrymen from tearing each other apart. All the while keeping an eye on the ships in case the aliens decided to actually do something.

It could have been worse. It could have been Atlanta or New York or even Boston instead of Montreal, but it was still bad enough that many wished they could follow their bosses into the Diefenbunkers.

Mailloux narrowly dodged the beer bottle that came in over the barricades and shattered on the wall behind him. It wasn't a Molotov thankfully, but he was sure those would soon be coming. Reinforcements would not be, judging by what he had heard of other attempts by the Province of Quebec to "protect domestic assets" belonging to private businesses and even individual citizens. Food, fuel, and other essential supplies would be guarded and distributed as needed from certain centralized locations (government buildings, large shopping centres), and removed to those locations from less-convenient ones (everywhere else).

He commanded about a dozen men holding defensive positions around the mid-sized general store. In the back was the shop owner and some employees who had complained too adamantly and were now in flex-cuffs (lucky fools, people on both sides of the border were being shot for less). There were a handful of officers from the Sûreté du Québec, but they weren't well liked in these parts and most chose to stay out of sight in the back with their prisoners. The exception was one loud fellow who kept yelling at the crowd through his megaphone.

"Quel sot! Doesn't he know that most Mohawks don't even speak French?" asked one of the soldiers. Royal 22e was a bilingual regiment, and communicating with the locals was supposed to be their job.[3]

"In this crowd? A few of those sauvages probably speak neither French nor English." said another.

Mailloux didn't care much for that kind of talk. He didn't like the anarchic and confrontational attitude of the protesters and was seldom one to question orders, but he did understand their anger. Moreover, he had no desire to die trying to take food from their community.

"We don't have a chance if they launch an assault on this store. I think they're better armed than we are." he noted.

"How did that happen anyway? I mean, where did all those guns come from?"

"Sergeant, where do the guns always come from?"

* * *

><p><strong>3 May, 2011<br>St Johnsbury, Vermont**

"Boston, Montreal, NYC" said Bonnie Garcia of the Vermont Militia, pointing sequentially to the wagons being loaded outside the refurbished munitions plant. "Just like back in the Civil War, although it's mostly AK-pattern weapons these days. Second to maple syrup, probably our number one export to the rest of New England."

"And nowadays I take it the flatlander politicians don't complain about it?" asked James Tagliabue of the Maine Militia, who was sitting on the bench beside her, waiting for the next open seat to Boston.[4]

"I don't care if they do or not, so long as I never hear another North Alabama or Texas-with-snow joke. Pennsylvania is North Alabama!"

"Yeah, and Vermont isn't diverse enough to pass as Texas."

"Yeah, um, and Maine... so anyway, Sturm Ruger relocated to Allentown and I'll be picking up some blueprints and machinery for the Mini-14 there. Our Kyber Pass Kalashnikovs are well and good, but ammunition for them is tight. And what, may I ask, brings you out of the Land of Lobsters and Verbose Horror Writers?"

"I'm a pediatrician. Joining up with a science team in Massachusetts. They're heading further south to do research on harness removal techniques."

"Really? Well, it's surprising enough that the flatlanders can hang on at all, let alone find a cure for the harnesses. I hear that Porter has his problems, but he seems to have a real knack for keeping his people alive. Best of luck to you, then."

* * *

><p>1. Fourth largest land army in the world by 1945, with some very impressive showings throughout. Something I like to do when my fellow countrymen disparage the wartime record of France or Canada is point out that one has put Russia's capitol to the torch while the other played a role in the torching of our capitol (though as far as I can tell, no Canadians were directly involved in the burning of DC—sorry Three Dead Trolls.)<p>

Another fun fact: between 5,000 and 30,000 Canadians may have served with US Armed Forces during the Vietnam War, nearly equaling the number of Americans who went to Canada to avoid the draft.

2. Swarm on the Somme, a very bleak, very long, but very good story about alien monstrosities invading Earth in 1915.

3. Most Mohawks in Quebec are Anglophones, being as they are descended from people who had once lived in the present-day United States. The Mohawk Nation had been a historic British ally and one of the first acts of the New American Republic was to kill or exile anyone at all who might have been singing God Save the King back during the war years.

Canadians like to see themselves as a family-friendly version of the United States: all the wealth and prestige, less of the violence and racism. To an extent that's true, but if you're of a mischievous type you can often get otherwise fun-loving and level-headed Candians to show their fangs by mentioning a simple three-letter sequence: OKA. In 1990, the City of Oka tried to build a golf course on the burial grounds of the Mohawk people, the Mohawk resisted, and the Canadian military came very close to going to war with them.

4. The People's Republic of Massachusetts ain't really known for its gun culture and this has been noted by pretty much every Falling Skies detractor. See the hatefests on the TNT message boards—or don't, you won't miss much.

What these people forget is that right in Ted Kennedy's back yard is this very strange little state. Full of hippy scum, historical bastion of the US Socialist Party... and some of the most lenient gun laws in the country (also statistically the best drivers in the country; Massachusetts has the worst).

The rest of the region likes to accuse poor Vermont of being the cause of all their violent crime problems, and my theory has always been that Mason and friends got their guns from there when the motherships first showed up. Similar to how the National Rifle Association donated guns to the British Home Guard before American entry into World War II.

That, or Mason and Friends had them even though they weren't entirely legal. People do that sometimes.


	31. Chapter 31: Reinforcements

**Chapter 31: Reinforcements**

_"The patriot volunteer, fighting for his country and his rights, makes the most reliable soldier on earth."_  
>-Stonewall Jackson<p>

[The events that I'm about to describe were haphazardly recorded over the course of several days and weeks after the actual battle. There has been slight modification from what I originally wrote and it has been reviewed by others who took part in the fighting {so far the only chapters to receive such scrutiny} for the sake of accuracy and coherency. However, our conditions are still quite bad and I can't say that we'll excel in either area. This addendum was written on May 8th, 2011.]

* * *

><p><strong>2230, Saturday, April 16, 2011: Knight's Park Neighborhood<strong>

It was not an enjoyable sight watching stampeding civilians trying to put the Chattahoochee River between themselves and the spiders. Old people and children mostly. I guess it's true on both counts: people really will wait until the very last minute, and they can get complacent about anything, even encroaching aliens. We had one 13 year old boy jump into our truck: figuring that we were a bottom-of-the-barrel unit who wouldn't be picky about volunteers, reasoning that he would never get away in the chaos and opting to go down shooting. Awful spunky, and I'm glad we had something to give him that would do more to spiders than the single-shot .22 he was carrying.

They detrucked us south of the intersection of Marietta Boulevard Northwest and West Marietta Street. We were the right flank of an assault to break the encirclement of a company that was holding on to the Fulton County Jail, about a mile away. Marietta Boulevard itself was too thick with hostiles moving towards Bellwood Quarry, so we were to move through the residential areas via Mt Ephraim Baptist Church.

The main force seized the church and surrounding areas quickly. They knew the neighborhood and could cover ground faster than us. We had a little more trouble and it took awhile for us to make our way through the built-up projects, despite only intermittent contact with the enemy. We made up for lost time somewhat once we reached the older, more spaced-out portions of the neighborhood, but we immediately ran into a patrol of robots. Killed three of the five before we managed to disengage, with the loss of four of our own.

It was here that we made use of some turpentine-and-tarpitch Molotovs given to us by a unit from around Macon. They're about as ineffective as any other kind, but the thick smoke screen does come in handy. Our particular batch of sticky bombs weren't quite as adhesive as we'd like, but in the end they did their job.

* * *

><p><strong>0145, Sunday, April 17, 2011: Rice Street<strong>

The jail was a multistory building with two star-shaped towers dominating the surrounding area, though much of it had been shaved down from the continuous rocketfire of the robots. Nearby was other county and city properties, most in ruins from recurrent attacks and counterattacks. Next door was once one of the largest server farms in the South, leveled to the ground and with many of the computer mainframes being recycled as barricades up and down Jefferson Street. I was somewhat surprised to find former guards and inmates alike dug in here, and the number of enemies that had died trying to dig them out was also very surprising. If the fight for the Hapeville Wells Fargo Bank was best described as "Sihang Warehouse", then this situation could be called "Pavolv's House".[1]

And my relief column's situation could be called "late to the party", though I didn't realize it at the time. The anti-aircraft guns on the upper floors had protected the building from being nuked thus far, but they were beginning to run low on ammunition and alien ground forces were soon to overwhelm us in any event. The enemy wasn't assailing the walls of our castle at this point, he was pushing us back into the keep.

I was sent to the lower floors to support our machine gun positions: Maxims, Vickers, Brownings, and even a few Gatling guns. It's the kind of technology that helped make World War I so hellish, and they still cut a grisly swath through advancing infantry in World War A.

And so I was unofficially attached to the Heavy Machine Gun Platoon of the Fulton County Sheriff's Office for the duration of the battle, and often had to shoulder my M-4gery and work as a loader or ammo bearer. Our militias often adjust the number of crewmen according to how many guns are needed or available at any given moment, not the other way around. We overman them whenever we can to make up for the fact that our members are not quite as trained, young, strong, or healthy as the soldiers they were designed for. I'll never forget having once seen a .50 cal being lugged around by one prosthetic-legged donkey and about a dozen old ladies.

Anyway, I was at this for an hour or so, until we were given the order to pack up and pull back. That annoyed me quite a bit, because those guns were heavy and I didn't know that we had already been cut off. Knight's Park Neighborhood had once again fallen and there were no more reserves to try breaking into the jail, so the burden would be on us to break out.

* * *

><p><strong>0550, Sunday, April 17, 2011: Jailbreak<strong>

A jail makes a good fortress, and a fortress makes a good jail. And retreat is always a hectic and miserable affair, especially at night. The fact that I spent much of this period puking and crapping myself while trying to handle those guns didn't make it any more enjoyable. Thoughts of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire were in all our minds, but as my new comrades liked to say, we'd cross that overlapping field of fire when we reached it.

We made our run just after a failed push on our northwest side, in and around the main parking lot. The withdrawing spiders and robots must have been surprised to see us come up from our barricades and chase after them, because we took remarkably few casualties while going over the top.

We made it to the area between Marietta Boulevard and Rice Street. It had been crawling with spiders and robots earlier, but was rather quiet when we got there. Things started going bad when we approached the Fulton County Pound and the other industrial buildings between the Boulevard and CSXT Atlanta Terminal Subdivision.

They came charging at us from out of the dark and fighting soon devolved into hand-to-claw combat, at which humans can generally be expected to lose. Our force had to give ground, and we still feared being jumped on the other end by those who had been besieging us. So my platoon came onto the front, set up our guns in what cover we could find, swiveled into the faces of our foes and gave them an impromptu heavy metal concert. And by this it was their turn to give ground.

We had one encounter which reminded us of the fact that humans weren't the only ones hurting in this war. A crazed horse came through the darkness, nearly ran down my crew, and was gone before we could react. It had been on the wrong end of a plasma beam: badly burned, left a significant blood trail, and bits of rider could still be seen in the smoldering saddle.

I don't know what happened to that horse. Maybe it found a nice quite place to succumb to the injuries, or maybe someone had the kindness of heart to shoot it.

I felt a deep nervousness as I walked through that area, even when the bullets weren't flying. It was a morass of fallen timbers, broken landscape and tangled wreckage from the panicked evacuations and all the subsequent fighting. From what I could see of the buildings, they looked like some giant had gone clogging on them and littered the surrounding area with chunks of concrete the size of railroad cars.

Speaking of railroad cars, I had another militiaman tell me that he saw a coal car lodged in a house on Willie Street, no less than 300 yards from the tracks. He had even drawn a sketch of it and showed it to me later.

I don't even want to know how that happened.

* * *

><p><strong>0700, Sunday, April 17, 2011: Bellwood Quarry<strong>

Down to two-thirds effectiveness, we finally reached our assigned destination at the trenches overlooking the open ground of the Quarry. And when I say "The Quarry", what I actually mean is the expansive greenspace that makes up much of this area. I used to come out here with friends all the time. It's a pretty big area, and would have become the biggest park in Atlanta had the BeltLine plan been completed. BeltLine would have doubled the amount of urban park space in the city, something that is definitely needed.[2]

But when I say "the trenches", I mean honest-to-God trenches. I've spoken of trenches before, but what I'm usually describing are slapdash breastworks or barricades thrown together by people without the training, time, inclination or need for anything better. But here someone actually took the time for some hardcore shovel work.

And they defended in depth too: there's firing trenches, cover trenches, support trenches, reserve trenches, communication trenches, sandbag parapets, dugouts, drainage systems, walkways wide enough for two or three men to pass, partial overhead cover, grenade sumps.

Why on Earth do we need grenade sumps? No one's going to be throwing grenades at us. For that matter, were the dugouts, cover and spaciousness of the trenches really the best use of a trench-digger's time and effort, when it's very possible that no one will ever stay here long enough to make use of them? It's doubtful that it could protect us from direct rocketfire, and I've never heard of bombers hitting trenches. As a former Yellowjacket, I can appreciate over-engineering, but there's a difference between over-engineered and superfluous.

I tried to find out later what madmen were responsible for these marvels, but to no avail. It was suggested that they may have been dug well before anyone realized they'd be needed by someone who needed to stay busy, perhaps as a form of punishment or stress relief[3] or just plain boredom. I'm inclined to believe that, loath though I am to admit that the concept of busy-work is still with us.

* * *

><p><strong>0720, Sunday, April 17, 2011: Battle for Bellwood Quarry<strong>

We had one last big push against us as the new day dawned. There was illumination from east and west as someone, somewhere received a small nuke. Not the first thing you want to get a clear view of in the light of day.

Anyway, there were scattered probing attacks throughout the morning, which we repelled with relative ease. I did most of that work with my rifle, which works well enough at range, though I still miss my M-14.

Afternoon brought a relative lull in the combat that gave us a chance for maintenance, a hot meal, some sugar water and electrolytes for the diarrheal amongst us, and even some shuteye. Napping in one of those comfortable dugouts, I no longer cared how militarily useful they were or how much time our unknown engineers wasted digging them.

They also allowed for a bit of privacy. I was provided with some extra sets of clothing, as my lingering medical problems left quite a mess on (in) my old ones (Denise would probably call my situation a "code brown"). The others left me alone to change, and afterwards I asked if I should try cleaning what I had been wearing or just get rid of it. The decision was pretty much unanimous.

The day wore on, with some probes here and there, and I was beginning to feel much better physically. Good thing, because I was going to need all the energy I could get in the coming night.

* * *

><p>1. Apartment building in the former Stalingrad, Soviet Union. Famously defended by former resident Sergeant Yakov Pavlov and 25 men against repeated assaults by dozens of German tanks and hundreds infantry. Vasily Chuikov, commanding general of the Soviet forces in Stalingrad, later bragged that the Germans lost more men trying to take Pavlov's house than they did taking Paris. One of those rare cases of a lopsided defense where the defender winds up emerging victoriously rather than dying gloriously.<p>

2. If anyone has ever seen much of The Walking Dead (I haven't; I don't like those kinds of shows, and there's usually too many kids around where I watch TV for something like that to be recorded on the VCR or DVR), this is where they filmed the camp scenes from the first season. Nice little patch of outdoors well within the city limit.

She's right that Atlanta and indeed most Southern cities could use more parkland, but got the numbers slightly wrong. BeltLine plans to increase the amount of urban park space by 40%, though given the events in our story I'm sure we'll ultimately see much of the city being refoliated.

3. Digging holes=surprisingly therapeutic.


	32. Chapter 32: Holding the Line

_"He was at a task. He was like a carpenter who has made many boxes, making still another box, only there was furious haste in his movements. He, in his thought, was careering off in other places, even as the carpenter who as he works whistles and thinks of his friend or his enemy, his home or a saloon. And these jolted dreams were never perfect to him afterward, but remained a mass of blurred shapes."_

-Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

* * *

><p><strong>20:10, Sunday, April 17, 2011: Sunset<strong>

It started typically enough: they came at us, we killed them. .50's and bigger took down the big ones and the rest of us handled the small ones. M-4s kill just as dead as M-14s, it's just a matter of increasing the quality and/or quantity of your shots.

But then it started getting a little harder than usual. Their attacks were progressively better planned, and they'd learned to mask their movements and bob around a bit to make themselves harder to hit. A few were even LEAPING towards us, like giant demonic grasshoppers.

One of those leapers came right in on our gun position and would have probably taken my head off were it not for the intervention of a fellow crewman, a tight-lipped former nuclear physicist who wields a crowbar like it was the flaming sword of an avenging angel. I owe my life to him, which probably means I can't make fun of his neurotic fixation for that tool anymore.

Ammunition was chronically low for most of the night, and it never seemed that they weren't on the verge of overrunning us. We thought they were hitting us with limitless hordes, but later research indicates that their numbers were greatly overestimated by us and many others who took part in the fighting that night.

Contrary to the Banzai Charges we've come to expect, we think they were doing something similar here to what the Chinese did in Korea: send small teams to sneak in as close as they could to our lines, storm specific weak spots while keeping us busy everywhere with random probing attacks, throw their follow-on forces into any breaches to get behind us, hit us from behind and destroy the defenses in detail. Between our poor C&C and their learning curve, we really never know how many of them we're dealing with.

* * *

><p><strong>20:45, Sunday, April 17, 2011: Moonrise<strong>

Have you ever had a dream of being in a fight and unable to harm your opponent? I never had, until after that night. Now I can't close my eyes without seeing hordes of them making mince meat out of me. I had chase dreams for the first time since childhood shortly after the start of the invasion. Those mostly ended after the first month and I can only hope that these do too.

I still don't know for sure just how many assaults we endured. That leaper wasn't the last to die in our trench, and before long that nice trench was covered with shreds and pieces of men and aliens alike. After midnight we received word that our entire front was disintegrating and we'd have to fall back. They kept coming as we retreated, wave after wave running us down no matter what we threw at them or how fast we tried to move.

I don't know how any of us got out of the Quarry, and many details from that night are lost to me. I've asked around, and it seems that many of us only remember the battle in bits and fragments. I was never a big believer in repressed memory (then again, once upon a time I wasn't a big believer in aliens), but I am familiar with depersonalization, derealization and other aspects of traumatic psychological weirdness and it seems that something very much like that has affected me and many other participants.[1]

* * *

><p><strong>0700, Monday, April 18, 2011: Moonset<strong>

Somehow, I found another line to hold along with a bunch of other humans from a bunch of other units: scattered remnants from the scattered remnants from what had never been a top-tier army in the first place. As I later learned, 7 of the state's 25 regiments sent significant formations into this meatgrinder.

We set up in the woods along Johnson Road, fighting under the terrible glow of multiple wildfires and the light of a brilliant full moon that seemed to turn the night into day. The Marietta Road Bridge over Inman Rail Yard and the nearby Bridge Family Center was the scene of some of the most thorough airstrikes I'd ever seen directed against frontal positions (really starting to miss those over-engineered trenches back in Bellwood at this point). We lost them both after heavy resistance, but successfully blunted the enemy onslaught at the MARTA bus garage on Perry Boulevard. They did continue pressing into the rail yard, and by the first light of morning I was behind a kudzu patch, in another trench with some rather nice battlements made from railroad ties, ready to deal with this new problem.

* * *

><p><strong>0705, Monday, April 18, 2011: Sunrise<strong>

Nothing except doing battle in the trenches is as taxing on the mind as waiting for battle in the trenches. We've adapted a rough policy of Standing-To in the evenings and mornings, not unlike the armies in the trenches of the First World War. They would often fire blindly into No Man's Land as a means of dissuading attacks and relieving tension, something that our chronic lack of ammunition won't allow.

We did find another means of calming our nerves. Someone along the line must have grown tired of hearing the constant noise made by those robots. He decided to respond with some noise of his own:

_"Stand up, stand up for Jesus, ye soldiers of the cross;  
>Lift high His royal banner, it must not suffer loss."<em>

It started slow, slightly hoarse and uneven, but it's a rather popular song in this area and some of our other singers soon picked it up.

_From victory unto victory His army shall He lead,  
>Till every foe is vanquished, and Christ is Lord indeed.<em>"

Soon pretty much everyone in the immediate area, good singers and bad, were singing along. There must have been one hundred fifty of us in total.

_"Stand up, stand up for Jesus, the solemn watchword hear;  
>If while ye sleep He suffers, away with shame and fear;"<em>

Our choir seemed to grow with each syllable. By this point it stretched from the bus garage to halfway across the yard. Five hundred at least.

_"Where'er ye meet with evil, within you or without,  
>Charge for the God of battles, and put the foe to rout."<em>

From the redoubted CSX office to the Johnson Road trenches. Two thousand.

_"Stand up, stand up for Jesus, the trumpet call obey;  
>Forth to the mighty conflict, in this His glorious day."<em>

From Rockdale Park to the industrial center of Blandtown, in ruins even before the aliens came. Eight thousand.

_"Ye that are brave now serve Him against unnumbered foes;  
>Let courage rise with danger, and strength to strength oppose."<em>

From the Second Refuge Pentecostal Church and nearby Hollywood Road to the Atlanta Water Works and nearby Howells Rail Yard, both sites of frustrated enemy advances. Thirty-two thousand.

These numbers are estimates of course, but if they are correct then it means that about two-thirds of the soldiers still alive and involved in the defense of Northwest Atlanta took part in the singing.

And that's what we did all day. When we weren't shooting, we were singing. We later sang This is My Father's World (which amused me quite a bit), and Be Thou My Vision (which I also prefer to Stand Up for Jesus, the latter being in my opinion far too bellicose for a church hymn.)[2] We sang a lot of gospel, patriotic, and folk songs (so many Dylan and Springsteen songs), and things got a little weird when we started running out of ideas. Some of us sang Men of Harlech, of course, (a few verses in Welsh, no less) and Non Nobis in Latin. The Spiders must have liked the music, because they did little to hinder our performance. Just a few probing attacks and general harassment throughout the day, without even the evening escalations.

Had they exhausted their attack, were they taking a short breather, or were they just easing off so they could bring in nukes to finish the job?

* * *

><p>1. Psychogenic amnesia in general is still a touchy subject, and the more specific issue of repressed memory has received skepticism due to much quackery and harm stemming from the hypnosisrepressed-memory child abuse debacles. But the fact that memories are often forgotten, created or altered during traumatic events seems true enough.

2. I don't mind bellicosity in my hymns, but I do agree that those are good songs and had wanted to use the lyrics of one or the other, but they don't seem to be as well known locally. Amazing Grace could have worked, but would have been cliché.


	33. Chapter 33: A Farmer's Prayer

**Chapter 33: A Farmer's Prayer**

_"Heavenly Father, King of the Universe, you are the sole source of abundance. With your help I plant my crops and by your power they give forth a harvest._

_Grant me the grace always to work with all my strength and ingenuity in cultivating the soil so that it will bring forth fruits for my benefits and the benefit of all who will use them. Make me ever cognizant that without my part in the work of harnessing the goods of the earth, these particular goods would be lacking to my brothers and sisters in this world._

_Enable me at the same time to realize that without your part in this process I would be working in vain. Accept my thanks for your continuous help in the past and your never failing assistance in the future. Amen."_

* * *

><p><strong>*interlude*<br>**17 April, 2011**  
>Knight's Park Neighbourhood, Atlanta, Georgia, USA<br>**

Robert Williams Clifton fired twice for good measure: once in the head and once in the center of mass. He had never euthanized a horse before, knew little of their anatomy and wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. A few dying spasms and he seemed to get what he wanted.

"I always feel sorry for the horses." said Lieutenant Simmons. "I mean, we deserve it, people deserve everything they get, but the horses don't. One thing you have to say for mechanized warfare, it saved a lot of horses from some horrible deaths."[1]

"Yup, sure am going to miss it." said Clifton.

"That was a Morgan." said one of the soldiers detached from 12th Regiment. "F Troop from the Second Cav rides Morgans; they're suppose to be screening to the south of here."

Clifton shook his head ruefully. "That doesn't bode well for F Troop."

"Doesn't bode well for none of us. If the Roaches want the rest of this neighbourhood, there's nothing our recon teams can do to stop them. Can't hide from them either; our escape from King Plow proved that. We're stretched out as thin as a 'coon on I-95 in this area…"

"…RAcoon." added the newcomer quickly. "Not a, well…"

Clifton chuckled, and then nodded grimly. "You're right. Our units ain't built for pitched battles. None of the militias were, but that ship done sailed. What I want you to do is get Jones, find something fast and not dead, head back to Mount Ephraim Baptist and tell them we're pulling out and they should too if they ain't done it already."

"You going to Blandtown?" he asked.

"No. Change of plans there—we're going to the Hemphill Water Treatment Plant, via The Goat Farm. Tell the regiment to send more troops if they can. More food too."

"I can help on that last part." said Madea, drawing a buck knife and eying the slain horse."You're… Lieutenant, you don't mean…?"

"Better start widening your definition of 'food', city boy." she told her commanding officer "The hillbillies who ain't down here getting their butts shot off can barely feed themselves right now, and I don't see the horses replacing trucks and tractors both."

* * *

><p><strong>22 <strong>April, 2011<strong>  
>Near Montezuma, Georgia<br>**

The Mennonite farmer bade his animals a happy Karfreitag as he set about the morning chores. He hoped that the 648th Engineers would be by to pitch a hand today, though he wasn't sure how much help he could get out of the English.

Hearing the drone of unnatural engines in distance, Jonathan Overholt cast a glance towards the edge of his field where his SKS was sitting. His ordnung was still adamantly opposed to harming humans, but each member could act "according to his conscious" on the issue of violence towards sentient nonhumans.[2]

Overholt had always considered the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence to be likely, but he had always hoped that any creatures capable of interstellar travel would have rejected violence.[3] Unfortunate that it was not to be, but he tried not to worry too much about it, as he knew that God was ultimately in control of all things on this world and all others. The newarrivals were under His dominion and he would not worry about them, not when there was still corn to plant and horses to train. If the fields didn't keep him busy, the Remount Service would.

He heard the sound of a diesel engine revving in the distance, a sound that grew rarer by the month and that he would miss very much if it ever disappeared entirely. There were so many things, closer to home than aliens, to worry about.

The English often thought of his people as being completely separate from the rest of the planet. And while it was a tenant of their faith that they not by tied to things of the world, the societal changes that had made independent living so difficult for English farmers had not completely passed over the Plain People; where Jonathan's grandparents seldom bought any perishable goods besides salt, sugar, and maybe nails from outside their community, his children ate General Mills Cheerios and his wife bought fabrics at Walmart. They were in a better position than most no doubt, but transition was going to be hard for everyone.[4]

* * *

><p>1. Twice as many horses died as humans during the American Civil War, which seems to be fairly typical for most wars up until 1918. If World War II was the worst war for civilians and World War I was the worst war for soldiers, the Second Boer War was probably the worst for horses. The British equine attrition rate was 120 percent of the initial stock, and the life-expectancy of a horse in the Cape was about six weeks.<p>

2. The US military used to only give contentious objector status to people who were officially members of Peace Churches, but many Mennonite and Amish congregations only give membership to adults. So it was quite possible for one to receive a letter from the draft board before receiving a letter from the church.

My uncle served alongside an Amish mechanic (not as oxymoronic as you might think; they're generally forbidden from owning cars, not fixing them) in Vietnam. The mechanic refused to carry a gun, but he was issued one and told to keep it handy, apparently with the idea that he could become a Baptist if Charlie ever came charging over the walls.

3. An Anabaptist Saganist? I don't know how the Amish or Mennonites generally feel on the subject of ET, but from what I do know of them I'd say it's probably about the same as for most rural Americans: about a quarter believe in aliens, about a quarter don't, and about half are undecided.

4. What about the issue of pacifism post-TEOTWAWKI, you ask? That'll probably get a lot of these people killed, but one must remember that they tend to live pretty far out in the sticks, surrounded by people like me who are insanely violent yet would rather have them as our neighbours than those who might displace them, even if the Amish are essentially Reformation-era hippie scum. I think they'll do just fine.


	34. Epilogue

The months of March and April would mark a significant change in the nature of the war. Tactically, it was a victory for the humans—the Espheni gained relatively little ground, accomplished little to nothing in terms of their objectives, and lost much in fighters and material. Strategically, however, the Georgia Militia was crippled as a cohesive fighting force. In proving that they could stand and hold against the strongest of enemy assaults, they rendered themselves wholly incapable of ever doing so again.

Half of all humans who participated in the fighting were killed or seriously wounded; over one-sixth of militia personnel in Atlanta at the time. With entire regiments being wiped off the face of the Earth, hopes of containing the alien threat—whatever practicality they ever held in the first place— were relinquished as the focus of the remaining units (who more and more acted on their on volition) shifted firmly to survival, research and harassment.

Worse, enemy units could now operate behind relatively unmolested their lines. They were overextended, over mobilized, and lacked the defensive depth and coverage to handle the "raider" tactics which they themselves had used so successfully against the Espheni.

In successfully holding the perimeter, they had lost the ability to hold any land beyond that upon which their soldiers were standing.

* * *

><p><strong>Wednesday, April 20, 2011<strong>

Lying beneath her ratty sleeping bag on a cot that smelled like motor oil and spleen, Sarah Tagliabue patted her M14 as if it was the beloved family dog gone missing for a month. She had spent half the day cleaning the blood off of it and still wasn't satisfied with her work, but it would have to do till tomorrow.

It was nice to be back with G Company, even if the company had only thirty-three members alive and accounted for, and eleven combat-effective, her not among the latter. They were holed up with other wartime vagrants in a crowded garage near the rail yard, on the grounds of what had once been the Atlanta Stockyards to await likely disbandment and reassignment. Until then, they were still a big happy family.

Sarah felt a nudge and looked up to see the scruffy face of Sergeant Skitter Bishop—highest-ranking survivor in the company—with his tape recorder in one hand and a steaming bowl in the other. She let out an low groan; forget family, trust the psychos to make it through anything.

"Wake up, Lobster Girl. Soup."

"Squirrel?"

"Urban squirrel. Caught it just this morning. Eat."

Sarah filled her spoon with Skitter's gourmet cooking and took a hearty slurp. It wasn't lobster, or squirrel, but it was good.

"Serves them right for eating holes in my sleeping bag. So, I hear you also have family up north..."

"You mean cousin John and his people? Yeah, good ole cousin John. Runs an operation in Massachusetts fairly similar to what I had going; if he's still alive he's probably fighting the spiders off single-handedly. But whatever adventure he's up to, I guess that's someone else's story."


	35. Errors, Afterword and Observations

_"Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind."_  
>-Terry Pratchett<p>

* * *

><p><strong>Errors and Corrections:<strong>  
>Chapter 7: If the tanks and other vehicles in Afghanistan have been knocked out by EMPs, so too should surface-to-air missiles. (thanks to Thresher)<p>

Chapter 24: Modern diesel engines can run without their computer software; cool as it may be, rebuilding these from mason-jar vacuum-tubes probably wouldn't be necessary or practical.

The danger of EMP in general is somewhat overrated in fiction; it is a danger, but not to the "*poof* we're back to the Stone Age" level that some movies like to portray. Even EMP-vunerable electronics stored in grounded metal cages and a metal warehouse should be relatively safe. A busted microwave makes an excellent Faraday cage; my dad's old chicken houses would make marginal ones. (thanks to Stalkere/Lazarus.357)

There are two good books out there that give excellent portrayals of what an EMP (or another Carrington Event) would actually look like: Lights Out by David Crawford and One Second After by William R. Forstchen.

Chapter 27: Giardiasis may not that hard to diagnose, even for people working with rudimentary training in primitive conditions. A single misperscription of steroids probably wouldn't muddle the waters that much. (thanks to Stalkere/Lazarus.357)

Chapter 29-32: Battle for Bellwood Quarry/Inman Yard. I'm pretty sure I got the geography and troop numbers wrong, but my research is all scattered across my harddrive and house, and I don't have the energy to work through it all (latter part would require me to, God forbid, clean this dump). Chalk any errors here up to the understandable mistakes of someone hastily jotting down her experiences in the midst of a very confusing conflict.

Chapter 33: The "Georgia Mennonites" are in fact Beachy Amish, one of the more modern/liberal Anabaptist sects. Most of them speak English, not German, as their first language and use tractors, not horses, to plow their fields. Seems I mistook them for the very conservative Old Order Amish of Ethridge, Tennessee.

[To be updated as other problems are brought to my attention. If anyone notices any typos or other errors, do PM me or mention them in comments section. Thank you.]

* * *

><p><em>"Is an alien attack possible? Of course it is. Statistically speaking, almost anything is possible."<em>  
>-Travis S Taylor<p>

* * *

><p><strong>Afterword:<strong>

Writing this was fun. At over 40,000 words, it's easily the longest work of anything that I've ever had the dedication to finish, and there's quite a few things I've learned:

1. I really need to use a dedicated beta reader. I look over my finished work and every little typo glares back at me... and when I try to correct them they seem to disappear again. About is bad is all the confusing and ugly-looking sentences that I don't have the technical skills to rectify.

2. I should put less trust in my internet connection and electric power, especially in times of bad weather. I could write another full story out of the brilliant writing I typed down and lost to blackouts and interweb hiccups.

3. There's something to be said for writing on a typewriter: you'll spend more time writing and less time playing minesweeper. Fact is, I probably get more words per hour sitting out behind the barn and hand-writing in a notebook than I usually do on the computer. It's especially nice now that all the sexy new printers have built-in scanners that'll transcribe your writing to text documents.

So, why did I do it? What ever lead me to think that I could crawl into Steven Spielberg's sandbox and do a better job than people who do it professionally?

Quite bluntly, my intent was shameless didacticism, as should be obvious to anyone not tuning in just now. (Reading the last part first, are you? Nasty habit, but I do it too sometimes.)

I've enjoyed the recent glut of post-apocalyptic films (Jericho, V, Walking Dead, Falling Skies, Revolution, I'm sure there's others), but I've also got some issues with how they've chosen to portray those events. Granted, it's probably for the best that they don't go into all the gory details on things like camp fever or what dogs will do after they've been a few days without their Kibbles, but compared to actual civilizational catastrophes they paint a downright rosy picture.

And how do we know what a civilizational catastrophe would look like? Well, we've experienced quite a few of them. Maybe not us in particular, but all of our ancestors were involved in at least one very big one: the Toba Catastrophe of 70,000 BC.

We in North Georgia were witness to some more recent ones: the 1800's were not a pleasant time here, with the Cherokee Removal taking up the first third of the century, the War Between the States taking up the second and Reconstruction plus the Moonshine Wars taking up the remainder. In the face of depleted natural resources/peak everything, climate change, social/civilizational decay, the fragility of modern technological society and numerous existential threats, something like that could very easily happen again. Many of my own ancestors wrote diaries about those experiences and it's those diaries that inspired me to write this one.

A lot of people see the more rugged parts of the American South as a place of sanctuary in hard times. I've heard people living as far away as the Florida Keys say that if anything bad ever happened, their plan would be to load the SUV with camping gear and whatever food's in their pantry and highball it to Appalachia. (I know people around here who plan on hiding out in the Atacama swamps, take that for what you will.)

It's true that the American Southeast is one of the more survivable portions of the country, but there's more to surviving a new Dark Age than just geography. And we hill folk are not quite the rugged individualists of generations past. "A Country Boy Can Survive!" proclaimed Hank Williams Jr. But as Travis Tritt lamented, "Country Ain't Country Any More". Population density is a lot higher than it ever was in the past, a lot of fields and forests are now paved over, many of the folks in the trailer parks would be completely helpless without their EBTs and methamphetamine, and even many self-proclaimed hillbillies often know very little about pre-industrial living beyond hunting, fishing and maybe rudimentary wilderness survival. Head up here and, if you survive the journey at all, you may well find yourself on unfamiliar ground amongst a bunch of people every bit as scared and hungry as you and not all that eager to show charity to strangers.

These days, even the Amish buy the cloth for their quilts at Wal-Mart, and are generally far more world-dependent than their grandparants who bought little besides salt from "English" businesses. Point being, if anything happens to this modern system of ours, it'll be very hard for anyone to adjust to life without it. Most likely wouldn't get the chance. It would be my hope that people reading Atlanta Burns Again keep things like that in mind.

But, more important than hardcore rightwing survivalist proselytizing, I wrote this because writing it was fun.

* * *

><p><strong>Miscellaneous thoughts:<strong>  
>I have just a few observations on the series itself: good, bad, and stupid. I've mentioned many of them elsewhere:<p>

1. Petroleum and food would be completely gone from most urban areas within days, even if there had been a 90% dieoff. The just-in-time system has ensured that any hiccup in the infrastructure means mass disorder (look at Katrina) at best and mass starvation at worst. Assuming there was any gasoline left to siphon, it would likely start going bad within a few months. Going south for the winter is wise, but going by vehicle might be quite a problem.

James Wesley Rawles' Patriots series covers this problem well. One might also look up the One-Hour Meltdown by Robert Wayne Atkins, and his Myth of the Just-In-Time (JIT) Inventory Strategy (actually, his entire website is an excellent resource for many things).

2. I love having a history professor as the main character. His references to the Mithridatic Wars (the Romans at Pontus) especially amused me, and I considered writing a fanfic wherein the 2nd Mass actually does that; reenacting the Sieges of Piraeus or Cyzicus. I also liked Lourdes; I don't know why many in the fandom seem to hate those two so much.

3. That said, the lapses in judgement among human characters are often simply confounding. From just the first season we had, what? The whole fighter/civilian dichotomy? Lack of any clear chain of command beyond the Captain and XO? Lack of a permanent guard on hospitals, armories and prisoners? Rick not being shoved into a straightjacket at the first sign of Stockholm Syndrome? No light/noise discipline in camp and characters running around in the open as if enemy air superiority wasn't a concern for them?

And what about the skitters? No small arms at all? Heavy weapon platform that you can hear a mile away and beat with a steep flight of stairs? Allowing hostile natives to come within touching distance of their installations?

Sure, aliens are alien and humans are stupid, but are they that stupid? Would exterminating us be such a bother if we were?

4. Season two is very much an improvement, but still has its odd points. Defensive abilities for both sides still seem to be awful. It made little sense that Diego and his gang would go their own way and not join the Second Mass, after doing so previously almost got them all harnessed. I can understand General Bressler's unwillingness to align with the rebels, even if I find it misguided, but would it not be more prudent to exterminate them AFTER their former masters are dealt with?

And the rebel skitters? Well, couldn't they possibly find a better pair of diplomats than Rick and Redeye?

5. Charleston, South Carolina might not be the best place to build an underground bunker network, being a low-lying coastal city and all. I'm surprised Will Patton (native Charlestonian) didn't point that out.

6. The alien occupation forces reminds me of what America did in Vietnam: going into the hinterlands with sporadic sweeps that never accomplished anything whilst camping out in the hamlets and cities, defenses of which were nonetheless hopelessly porous. Plot hole or design decision? Don't know yet.

7. I'm glad that mech-metal was dropped. I'm also happy to see the prevalence of M14s, anti-material rifles and shotguns in the second season. As for those flesh-eating robot spiders and mind-controlling robot mosquitoes, I think that's about the creepiest thing I've ever seen on Primetime TV.

Still, ammunition should be a constant worry for the humans, especially since they can't use the usual guerrilla tactic of trying to end each skirmish with more ammunition than they started. They got a mech arm-gun to fire at least once and if possible trying to reverse-engineer those should be a high priority for them.

8. Speaking of reverse-engineering, it would be a dictator's dream to get a hold of harnessing technology. I wonder how long it'll be before someone gets the idea of deliberately harnessing and deharnessing their teenagers for use as supersoldiers. Oh, of course few commanders in America or Europe would think to do such a thing, but few commanders anywhere else on the planet wouldn't.

* * *

><p>One last note, regarding this website in particular. Does anyone know a reliable means of getting a weblink in around the spam filters? I've tried several, but still seem to find them removed. Surely they're not using actual humans to watch for them.<p> 


End file.
